Democracy Now! - Democratic Partyhttp://www.democracynow.org/topics/democratic_party
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specificationmail@democracynow.org (Democracy Now!)http://www.democracynow.org/images/dn-logo-for-podcast.png?201507101653http://www.democracynow.org/topics/democratic_party
144144Democracy Now! - Democratic Partyen-USDemocracy Now! - Democratic PartyVermont Senator Bernie Sanders to Run for President, Focused on Inequality, Climate, Corporate Powerhttp://www.democracynow.org/blog/2015/4/28/vermont_senator_set_to_announce_presidential
tag:democracynow.org,2015-04-28:blog/939a84 The longest-serving independent member of Congress in U.S. history is set to announce his plans to seek the Democratic nomination for president. Vermont Public Radio reports Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) will make a short statement Thursday, then kickoff his campaign in the coming weeks. He is expected to continue his focus on income inequality, climate change (see his interview above) and opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.
Sen. Sanders will become the only official party challenger competing against former secretary of state, senator and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.
In 2014, he joined us to discuss how the impact of the Citizens United ruling that allows corporations to make unlimited donations to political campaigns, and said &quot;I fear that we may be on the verge of becoming an oligarchic form of society where a handful of billionaires control not just the economy, but the political life of this country. And that’s just something we’re going to have wrestle with.&quot;
Click here to see all of Sen. Sanders&#8217; interviews on Democracy Now!.
The longest-serving independent member of Congress in U.S. history is set to announce his plans to seek the Democratic nomination for president. Vermont Public Radio reports Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) will make a short statement Thursday, then kickoff his campaign in the coming weeks. He is expected to continue his focus on income inequality, climate change (see his interview above) and opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.

Sen. Sanders will become the only official party challenger competing against former secretary of state, senator and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

In 2014, he joined us to discuss how the impact of the Citizens United ruling that allows corporations to make unlimited donations to political campaigns, and said "I fear that we may be on the verge of becoming an oligarchic form of society where a handful of billionaires control not just the economy, but the political life of this country. And that’s just something we’re going to have wrestle with."

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Tue, 28 Apr 2015 21:15:00 -0400Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to Run for President, Focused on Inequality, Climate, Corporate Power The longest-serving independent member of Congress in U.S. history is set to announce his plans to seek the Democratic nomination for president. Vermont Public Radio reports Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) will make a short statement Thursday, then kickoff his campaign in the coming weeks. He is expected to continue his focus on income inequality, climate change (see his interview above) and opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.
Sen. Sanders will become the only official party challenger competing against former secretary of state, senator and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.
In 2014, he joined us to discuss how the impact of the Citizens United ruling that allows corporations to make unlimited donations to political campaigns, and said &quot;I fear that we may be on the verge of becoming an oligarchic form of society where a handful of billionaires control not just the economy, but the political life of this country. And that’s just something we’re going to have wrestle with.&quot;
Click here to see all of Sen. Sanders&#8217; interviews on Democracy Now!. nonadulttv-gDemocracy Now!NewsVermont Senator Bernie Sanders to Run for President, Focused on Inequality, Climate, Corporate Power The longest-serving independent member of Congress in U.S. history is set to announce his plans to seek the Democratic nomination for president. Vermont Public Radio reports Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) will make a short statement Thursday, then kickoff his campaign in the coming weeks. He is expected to continue his focus on income inequality, climate change (see his interview above) and opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.
Sen. Sanders will become the only official party challenger competing against former secretary of state, senator and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.
In 2014, he joined us to discuss how the impact of the Citizens United ruling that allows corporations to make unlimited donations to political campaigns, and said &quot;I fear that we may be on the verge of becoming an oligarchic form of society where a handful of billionaires control not just the economy, but the political life of this country. And that’s just something we’re going to have wrestle with.&quot;
Click here to see all of Sen. Sanders&#8217; interviews on Democracy Now!. nonadulttv-gDemocracy Now!NewsVermont Senator Bernie Sanders to Run for President, Focused on Inequality, Climate, Corporate Power The longest-serving independent member of Congress in U.S. history is set to announce his plans to seek the Democratic nomination for president. Vermont Public Radio reports Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) will make a short statement Thursday, then kickoff his campaign in the coming weeks. He is expected to continue his focus on income inequality, climate change (see his interview above) and opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.
Sen. Sanders will become the only official party challenger competing against former secretary of state, senator and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.
In 2014, he joined us to discuss how the impact of the Citizens United ruling that allows corporations to make unlimited donations to political campaigns, and said &quot;I fear that we may be on the verge of becoming an oligarchic form of society where a handful of billionaires control not just the economy, but the political life of this country. And that’s just something we’re going to have wrestle with.&quot;
Click here to see all of Sen. Sanders&#8217; interviews on Democracy Now!. nonadulttv-gDemocracy Now!NewsMeet Jesús "Chuy" García, the Chicago Activist Aiming to Unseat "Mayor 1%" Rahm Emanuelhttp://www.democracynow.org/2015/3/6/jesus_chuy_garcia_meet_the_chicago
tag:democracynow.org,2015-03-06:en/story/804f46 JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to Chicago, where Jesús &quot;Chuy&quot; García, the son of Mexican immigrants and an immigrant himself, shocked the nation&#8217;s political establishment last week by forcing Chicago&#8217;s powerful Mayor Rahm Emanuel into a runoff election. Now the race has turned into what could be the next big fight for the soul of the Democratic Party.
Many experts had predicted Emanuel would easily win the primary because of his political background as a former top White House aide to President Obama, who came to Chicago to endorse him. Emanuel also won the backing of Chicago&#8217;s major newspapers. By comparison, García was a little-known former city alderman, state senator, community organizer, and now Cook County commissioner. He raised just over $1 million in campaign donations, compared to Emanuel&#8217;s $15 million war chest. But on election night, Emanuel captured just 45 percent of the vote, below the 50 percent he needed to avoid a runoff. Meanwhile, García emerged a close second with 33 percent. This is García addressing his supporters after the news was announced.
JESÚS &quot; CHUY &quot; GARCÍA: Nobody thought we&#8217;d be here tonight. They wrote us off. They said we didn&#8217;t have a chance. They said we didn&#8217;t have any money, while they spent millions attacking us. Well, well, we&#8217;re still standing. We&#8217;re still running. And we&#8217;re going to win. We have something to say to all those big corporations and special interests who spent all those millions to install their own mayor: We want change!
AMY GOODMAN : Now, a new poll shows the gap between García and Emanuel closing to what the Chicago Sun-Times calls a &quot;dead heat.&quot; Emanuel leads by 43 percent, García has 39 percent. The incumbent mayor faces public dissatisfaction over his closing of 50 schools in mostly African-American neighborhoods, his handling of a 2012 teachers&#8217; strike, and the city&#8217;s high murder rate and levels of gun violence. This week, Mayor Emanuel is going on the offensive. He&#8217;s running a series of new campaign ads.
MAYOR RAHM EMANUEL : They say your greatest strength is also your greatest weakness. I&#8217;m living proof of that. I can rub people the wrong way or talk when I should listen. I own that. But I&#8217;m driven to make a difference. When politics stood in the way of a full-day kindergarten or tougher gun laws, I charged ahead. And when business interests said a $13 minimum wage was too high, I didn&#8217;t back down. Look, I&#8217;m not going to always get it right. But when it comes to fighting for Chicago and Chicago&#8217;s future, no one&#8217;s going to fight harder.
AMY GOODMAN : Mayor Emanuel is pouring millions into these runoff ads. For more on the possible unseating of the mayor, who some have nicknamed Mayor 1 Percent, we go to Chicago, where we&#8217;re joined by his challenger, Jesús &quot;Chuy&quot; García. We contacted Emanuel&#8217;s campaign and invited him to join us, as well, but they didn&#8217;t respond. If Chuy García is elected, he will become Chicago&#8217;s first-ever Latino mayor. The runoff election will take place on April 7th.
Chuy García, welcome to Democracy Now! Why are you running for mayor?
JESÚS &quot; CHUY &quot; GARCÍA: Good morning. Great to be with you, Amy. I&#8217;m running for mayor of the city of Chicago because Chicago needs to go in a different direction. For the past four years, we&#8217;ve seen Mayor Emanuel arrive in town with a boatload of money, impose his policies on the people of the city of Chicago. They favored a select few in Chicago. Through the amassing of large sums of money, he thought he could get re-elected, while leaving behind Chicago neighborhoods, making Chicago a city that leads the nation in the number of school closings—almost 50—and making Chicago, at the same time, one of the most violent cities in the country. We&#8217;ve experienced in the past four years 10,000 shootings, for example. So people in the neighborhoods feel left behind. They have come together, supported me for mayor. We&#8217;ve forced him into a runoff by building a coalition that is truly multiracial, multiethnic, across faith and across geography in Chicago. We&#8217;re fighting back against the agenda that was imposed on Chicago, and we want some attention and resources and investment in Chicago neighborhoods.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Chuy García, one of the big issues, obviously, in this race has been education—the mayor&#8217;s policies on school closings, on charter schools and his reform agenda. Could you talk about your differences with him on this issue and your own history in terms of seeking education reform?
JESÚS &quot; CHUY &quot; GARCÍA: Yes. The mayor has total control of the Chicago public school system. It was a bill that gave the mayor that exclusive control in 1995. I was a member of the Illinois Senate. I voted against that bill, thought it was a bad idea. It also ushered in the era of charter schools, and Chicago now has 125 charter schools.
The mayor appoints people who have been loyal to him. Some of them have had conflicts of interest while serving on the school board. Their companies have profited. The business that they do, that the companies that some of those board members have, has grown tremendously over the past several years. It&#8217;s indicative of the mayor&#8217;s opposition to having an elected school board in Chicago. That question about an elected school board appeared on the ballot a week ago last Tuesday, and it received 88 percent of the vote in support. People want greater accountability, they want a say-so, and they want an elected school board.
What we&#8217;ve seen in Chicago is a policy of inequality, a lack of equity. You have some parts of the city that have really good public schools, other parts of the city that don&#8217;t have the resources that you need to have successful education occurring. Those schools happen to be located in some of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago. And, of course, the schools that were closed in Chicago are primarily in low-income areas that are predominately African-American and Latino.
There&#8217;s another issue in the school system, which is standardized tests. Teachers focus so much time and energy in teaching students how to pass tests that they&#8217;re not able to educate them. So our students are overtested and undereducated.
And those are some of the issues that are being debated with respect to schools in Chicago, in addition to, of course, the issue of how you invest in having a robust system of public schools and, of course, stopping the charter mania, the rush to open up as many charter schools as possible without demonstrating that in fact charter schools are superior to the neighborhood schools in Chicago, which means a siphoning of money. I recognize that there are some good charter schools in Chicago, but the charter mania, the rush to create additional charter schools, has just created a second tier of schools in our system. I will put an end to that. We will, of course, guarantee that all students, including those attending current charters, receive a good education, but we should not continue to just open charters and create a two-tier school system in the city of Chicago.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I wanted to ask you again about your own history in this area. Back when you were leading a major—Enlace, a major community organization in Chicago, you led a protest and hunger strike by parents to build a public school. And my understanding is somebody by the name of Arne Duncan was the one who eventually caved in and agreed to build the high school that you were seeking?
JESÚS &quot; CHUY &quot; GARCÍA: Yes. We had to engage in a fight in 2001 in an area known as Little Village in the city of Chicago. The Chicago public school system had promised to build a new high school by 2001, the year that it should have opened. No high school had been built yet. Parents and other leaders in the community decided they had to do something really unconventional. They engaged in a hunger strike that lasted 19 years—pardon me, 19 days. It was a group of mothers. It was a group of students, other leaders in the community. And it really forced the Chicago Public Schools and the mayor to come to the table, to sit down and negotiate.
It resulted, in part, in the exiting of the CEO of the public school system at that time. There was a change in leadership. After Arne Duncan came in as superintendent of the school system, we sat down, we negotiated. And a new high school, a very innovative high school, with four small schools in one shared facility, that educates children who are Latino, many of them immigrants, and African-American, about 30 percent of them—it is a very successful school, it&#8217;s a very peaceful school, and it is graduating students and sending them to colleges and universities in unprecedented numbers, thereby showing that you can have great schools in low-income neighborhoods and working-class neighborhoods in Chicago. And if we&#8217;re able to do it there, it means that you&#8217;re able to do it in other parts of the city, thus underscoring the fight for public education. If we have the resources to have good schools, we can have great schools everywhere in the city of Chicago, and educational equity.
AMY GOODMAN : Speaking of education, we interviewed Karen Lewis several times, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, and she told us about a private meeting she had with Mayor Rahm Emanuel. This was back in 2012 we had this discussion. The meeting was about the city&#8217;s plan to shut down seven schools and fire all the teachers at 10 other schools.
KAREN LEWIS : When I first met him, we had dinner together, and he said, &quot;Well, you know, 25 percent of these kids are never going to be anything. They&#8217;re never going to amount to anything. And I&#8217;m not throwing money at it.&quot; And I was like, &quot;Wow! You know, even if you believe that, you can&#8217;t say that to me.&quot; So, I just watch how he has used black and brown and poor children as props to push an agenda that is all about privatization and all about so-called accountability, but it&#8217;s really the status quo, because once schools get put on probation here in Chicago, the Chicago Public Schools takes over, takes away the democratically controlled local school councils, takes that power away from them to hire and fire and evaluate principals and to spend discretionary funds. So, we see this culture of punishment and culture of disinvestment, and it is rampant and obviously spreading throughout the country.
AMY GOODMAN : That&#8217;s the former head of the teachers union, Karen Lewis. Talking to The Daily Beast at the Democratic convention that same year, in 2012, Chicago Mayor Emanuel defended the city&#8217;s proposed education reform.
MAYOR RAHM EMANUEL : I started school yesterday at three different schools where Chicago started school day. After a decade of discussing it, we now finally have the full school day and full school year. We cheated our children for over a decade an hour and 15 minutes every day, two weeks out of the year. That used to be things that we didn&#8217;t give our children. Now we&#8217;re giving that.
DAILY BEAST REPORTER : Didn&#8217;t make you popular with the teachers unions, obviously.
MAYOR RAHM EMANUEL : But I know what it&#8217;s going to do for children&#8217;s lives.
DAILY BEAST REPORTER : All right, Rahm Manuel, [inaudible].
MAYOR RAHM EMANUEL : No, but—no, no, wait a second. Number two—yeah, this school year, the core curriculum, the most rigorous academic standards. This year, five new science and technology and math high schools, that go all the way through community college, don&#8217;t stop in high school. They go to two years community college, so it&#8217;s 19—14th grade, associated with five of the top technology companies of the country. We also added 6,000 kids to magnet schools, 6,000 kids to early childhood pre-K, as well as kindergarten programs. And we also now made available to parents for the first time online—every principal used to get a report card on their school how it was doing. We never gave it to the parents. You can&#8217;t ask for parent involvement who don&#8217;t get information. The most comprehensive, sweeping reform in schools. And why? Because if I get those kids educated, they have a future.
AMY GOODMAN : So that&#8217;s Rahm Emanuel speaking in 2012 and, before that, Karen Lewis, the head of the teachers union, who might well have run against Rahm Emanuel this year, but she was diagnosed with brain cancer. And, Chuy, she turned to you, is that right?
JESÚS &quot; CHUY &quot; GARCÍA: Yes. She approached me shortly after she came home after her surgery, her brain surgery that removed a tumor, and she asked me if I would consider running for mayor of Chicago. She didn&#8217;t just ask me; she said, &quot;You&#8217;ve got to step up, and you have to do this.&quot; And I asked her, &quot;Well, why are you asking me? I&#8217;m headed to a re-election victory without an opponent, first time in my life.&quot; And she said, &quot;You have a history. You have been a coalition builder. You have been a steady progressive over three decades in Chicago. You have relationships across the city. You can build a multiracial, multiethnic coalition across state. And this is the time for you to step up. The city needs you. And I hope that you&#8217;ll consider it.&quot; So I went home and talked to my wife. And we slept on it, we prayed on it, we contemplated it, and we asked for inspiration. And, of course, I decided to step up.
And here we are, a month out from a runoff election, having denied the mayor a re-election bid in his first effort and, of course, shaking things up in Chicago, saying that the neighborhoods in Chicago will be addressed. The neighborhoods in Chicago deserve a voice. We want to put an end to the mayor&#8217;s style and approach and policies in Chicago, to favoring a select few, giving tax breaks and tax incentives of our property tax dollars to rich corporations and wealthy individuals. We want democracy in Chicago. We want change. The voters, 55 percent of them, voted for change a week ago last Tuesday, on February 24th. That is unprecedented in Chicago. Folks thought that this was a conventional election. It has not been conventional whatsoever. Even though only 33 percent of the voters turned out, a majority of them voted for change.
And we&#8217;re now in a dead heat as we approach April 7. There&#8217;s a fight here for the heart and soul of Chicago. This is about whether Chicago will be a city that is inclusive of all of its people or whether it will continue to work for a select few of rich and powerful people. We overcame the money deficit. They threw everything that they had—negative ads, a barrage of propaganda. They outspent us 12 to one. But Chicagoans were clear on what they wanted: They wanted change. And thus Chicago is now at the forefront of a national debate about how you govern. Do you continue to let the powerful interests run your city, or do citizens fight back, unite and demonstrate that they can have a voice, they can chart a new course that is inclusive of the interests of all the people of Chicago?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Chuy García, you mentioned this whole issue of the favored treatment of the city&#8217;s elite. I want to read from a Chicago Tribune investigation of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his top 100 donors, that found, quote, &quot;a pattern of mutually beneficial interactions between the mayor and his major supporters. ... Nearly 60 percent of those 103 donors benefited from his city government, receiving contracts, zoning changes, business permits, pension work, board appointments, regulatory help or some other tangible benefit.&quot; Yet, despite this, the Chicago Tribune went on to endorse Emanuel for mayor. This whole issue of pay to play, could you talk about that?
JESÚS &quot; CHUY &quot; GARCÍA: Well, you know, as you pointed out, Juan, the two-part series that showed a clear pattern of pay to play, unethical conduct, of favoring the rich and powerful in Chicago, came out the Sunday and Monday of February 1st, 2nd. By the end of the week, they had endorsed the mayor for re-election. So it&#8217;s highly ironic that that took place. But, you know, you have to understand, you know, Chicago and who favors a mayor like Rahm Emanuel. I think it&#8217;s, you know, highly ironic that that happened, but at any rate, it didn&#8217;t affect people&#8217;s understanding of how they fare under this mayor. There have been many, many instances of those types of abuses and conflicts of interest. But Chicagoans want change. They voted for change. And as we move to April 7, they will get change.
We will generate even a stronger troop base in Chicago, a wonderful coalition that will overcome the 1 percent and all the rich and wealthy folks who want to keep Chicago working for the select few. The coalition will grow. This will be a tremendous battle that will also put Chicago at the forefront in terms of an agenda in what cities all over the country need. They need the attention of the federal government. We need to address our crumbling infrastructure system. We need more support from Washington, D.C. In order to address the violence in our cities, the disinvestment in many Chicago neighborhoods, we need a national work program that will enable us to put young men, in particular, and women in many parts of the city back to work so that we can have neighborhood revitalization. You can&#8217;t have successful neighborhood revitalization in some of Chicago&#8217;s poorest communities, especially the African-American community on the West Side and on the South Side, if you don&#8217;t put people back to work. These—
AMY GOODMAN : Chuy García, we don&#8217;t have much time, but I want to stay on this issue of African-American community and also the Latino community. In 1987, you spoke at the funeral of former Mayor Harold Washington, who became the first African-American mayor in Chicago in 1983. This is a clip of what you said.
JESÚS &quot; CHUY &quot; GARCÍA: To learn what makes us go, there&#8217;s no place you wouldn&#8217;t go, from the beaches of San Juan to the mountains of Mexico. And now that you&#8217;ve gone, we, the people, vow to stay strong. The unity of our coalition is a tribute to the Washington tradition. Today, today in &#39;87, we know that you&#39;re in heaven. Adiós, amigo. Adiós.
AMY GOODMAN : Chuy García, speaking at the funeral of former Mayor Harold Washington. For those watching on TV, you also saw a flash to Luis Gutiérrez. And I want to talk about the black-brown coalition of Chicago. Luis Gutiérrez, who is the first Midwestern Latino congressmember ever to be elected, is actually endorsing Mayor Emanuel. I wanted to get your comment on that and also how you will pick up support within the African-American community.
JESÚS &quot; CHUY &quot; GARCÍA: Well, first, to my old friend, Luis Gutiérrez, he apparently committed to the re-election of the mayor some time ago. They did serve together in Congress. There is a relationship there. I think the conventional thinking in Chicago was that Rahm Emanuel would coast to an easy re-election victory. But that was overlooking some of the major issues in Chicago—the school closings, the levels of violence, the disinvestment in many of the neighborhoods. It&#8217;s unfortunate that my old friend Luis Gutiérrez could not be with me in this election.
Nevertheless, in Chicago there is a real desire on the part of people everywhere—in the African-American community, in the Latino community, in working-class white communities—to want to come together and establish a new path for Chicago that is rooted in greater equity, that recognizes that we are each other&#8217;s future, and unless all of us have a voice and say-so in how our government is led, that we cannot have a sustainable city. In order for Chicago to be a truly world-class city, a truly great city, it needs to have great neighborhoods. You can&#8217;t have great neighborhoods unless you have good public education, good public schools within reach of those neighborhood residents. And we have to reduce our terrible violence in many of the neighborhoods in Chicago. Ten thousand shootings over the past four years is intolerable. We need a mayor who will be about the neighborhoods, who will have the disposition, the willingness to sit with neighborhood residents, who will be receptive to the need for mental health services in many of the neighborhoods in the city of Chicago. So, a mayor who is really in tune with ordinary people, with Chicago neighborhoods and with working people in Chicago is what residents in Chicago have said they want. And I intend to be that mayor for all of Chicago.
AMY GOODMAN : Jesús &quot;Chuy&quot; García, we want to thank you very much for being with us, running for mayor of Chicago, after—a runoff election that is set for April 7th.
JESÚS &quot; CHUY &quot; GARCÍA: Thank you, Amy and Juan.
AMY GOODMAN : He is running against Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Thanks so much.
JESÚS &quot; CHUY &quot; GARCÍA: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we head north to Massachusetts to talk about the Boston Marathon bombing trial. Stay with us. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to Chicago, where Jesús "Chuy" García, the son of Mexican immigrants and an immigrant himself, shocked the nation’s political establishment last week by forcing Chicago’s powerful Mayor Rahm Emanuel into a runoff election. Now the race has turned into what could be the next big fight for the soul of the Democratic Party.

Many experts had predicted Emanuel would easily win the primary because of his political background as a former top White House aide to President Obama, who came to Chicago to endorse him. Emanuel also won the backing of Chicago’s major newspapers. By comparison, García was a little-known former city alderman, state senator, community organizer, and now Cook County commissioner. He raised just over $1 million in campaign donations, compared to Emanuel’s $15 million war chest. But on election night, Emanuel captured just 45 percent of the vote, below the 50 percent he needed to avoid a runoff. Meanwhile, García emerged a close second with 33 percent. This is García addressing his supporters after the news was announced.

JESÚS "CHUY" GARCÍA: Nobody thought we’d be here tonight. They wrote us off. They said we didn’t have a chance. They said we didn’t have any money, while they spent millions attacking us. Well, well, we’re still standing. We’re still running. And we’re going to win. We have something to say to all those big corporations and special interests who spent all those millions to install their own mayor: We want change!

AMYGOODMAN: Now, a new poll shows the gap between García and Emanuel closing to what the Chicago Sun-Times calls a "dead heat." Emanuel leads by 43 percent, García has 39 percent. The incumbent mayor faces public dissatisfaction over his closing of 50 schools in mostly African-American neighborhoods, his handling of a 2012 teachers’ strike, and the city’s high murder rate and levels of gun violence. This week, Mayor Emanuel is going on the offensive. He’s running a series of new campaign ads.

MAYORRAHMEMANUEL: They say your greatest strength is also your greatest weakness. I’m living proof of that. I can rub people the wrong way or talk when I should listen. I own that. But I’m driven to make a difference. When politics stood in the way of a full-day kindergarten or tougher gun laws, I charged ahead. And when business interests said a $13 minimum wage was too high, I didn’t back down. Look, I’m not going to always get it right. But when it comes to fighting for Chicago and Chicago’s future, no one’s going to fight harder.

AMYGOODMAN: Mayor Emanuel is pouring millions into these runoff ads. For more on the possible unseating of the mayor, who some have nicknamed Mayor 1 Percent, we go to Chicago, where we’re joined by his challenger, Jesús "Chuy" García. We contacted Emanuel’s campaign and invited him to join us, as well, but they didn’t respond. If Chuy García is elected, he will become Chicago’s first-ever Latino mayor. The runoff election will take place on April 7th.

Chuy García, welcome to Democracy Now! Why are you running for mayor?

JESÚS "CHUY" GARCÍA: Good morning. Great to be with you, Amy. I’m running for mayor of the city of Chicago because Chicago needs to go in a different direction. For the past four years, we’ve seen Mayor Emanuel arrive in town with a boatload of money, impose his policies on the people of the city of Chicago. They favored a select few in Chicago. Through the amassing of large sums of money, he thought he could get re-elected, while leaving behind Chicago neighborhoods, making Chicago a city that leads the nation in the number of school closings—almost 50—and making Chicago, at the same time, one of the most violent cities in the country. We’ve experienced in the past four years 10,000 shootings, for example. So people in the neighborhoods feel left behind. They have come together, supported me for mayor. We’ve forced him into a runoff by building a coalition that is truly multiracial, multiethnic, across faith and across geography in Chicago. We’re fighting back against the agenda that was imposed on Chicago, and we want some attention and resources and investment in Chicago neighborhoods.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Chuy García, one of the big issues, obviously, in this race has been education—the mayor’s policies on school closings, on charter schools and his reform agenda. Could you talk about your differences with him on this issue and your own history in terms of seeking education reform?

JESÚS "CHUY" GARCÍA: Yes. The mayor has total control of the Chicago public school system. It was a bill that gave the mayor that exclusive control in 1995. I was a member of the Illinois Senate. I voted against that bill, thought it was a bad idea. It also ushered in the era of charter schools, and Chicago now has 125 charter schools.

The mayor appoints people who have been loyal to him. Some of them have had conflicts of interest while serving on the school board. Their companies have profited. The business that they do, that the companies that some of those board members have, has grown tremendously over the past several years. It’s indicative of the mayor’s opposition to having an elected school board in Chicago. That question about an elected school board appeared on the ballot a week ago last Tuesday, and it received 88 percent of the vote in support. People want greater accountability, they want a say-so, and they want an elected school board.

What we’ve seen in Chicago is a policy of inequality, a lack of equity. You have some parts of the city that have really good public schools, other parts of the city that don’t have the resources that you need to have successful education occurring. Those schools happen to be located in some of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago. And, of course, the schools that were closed in Chicago are primarily in low-income areas that are predominately African-American and Latino.

There’s another issue in the school system, which is standardized tests. Teachers focus so much time and energy in teaching students how to pass tests that they’re not able to educate them. So our students are overtested and undereducated.

And those are some of the issues that are being debated with respect to schools in Chicago, in addition to, of course, the issue of how you invest in having a robust system of public schools and, of course, stopping the charter mania, the rush to open up as many charter schools as possible without demonstrating that in fact charter schools are superior to the neighborhood schools in Chicago, which means a siphoning of money. I recognize that there are some good charter schools in Chicago, but the charter mania, the rush to create additional charter schools, has just created a second tier of schools in our system. I will put an end to that. We will, of course, guarantee that all students, including those attending current charters, receive a good education, but we should not continue to just open charters and create a two-tier school system in the city of Chicago.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I wanted to ask you again about your own history in this area. Back when you were leading a major—Enlace, a major community organization in Chicago, you led a protest and hunger strike by parents to build a public school. And my understanding is somebody by the name of Arne Duncan was the one who eventually caved in and agreed to build the high school that you were seeking?

JESÚS "CHUY" GARCÍA: Yes. We had to engage in a fight in 2001 in an area known as Little Village in the city of Chicago. The Chicago public school system had promised to build a new high school by 2001, the year that it should have opened. No high school had been built yet. Parents and other leaders in the community decided they had to do something really unconventional. They engaged in a hunger strike that lasted 19 years—pardon me, 19 days. It was a group of mothers. It was a group of students, other leaders in the community. And it really forced the Chicago Public Schools and the mayor to come to the table, to sit down and negotiate.

It resulted, in part, in the exiting of the CEO of the public school system at that time. There was a change in leadership. After Arne Duncan came in as superintendent of the school system, we sat down, we negotiated. And a new high school, a very innovative high school, with four small schools in one shared facility, that educates children who are Latino, many of them immigrants, and African-American, about 30 percent of them—it is a very successful school, it’s a very peaceful school, and it is graduating students and sending them to colleges and universities in unprecedented numbers, thereby showing that you can have great schools in low-income neighborhoods and working-class neighborhoods in Chicago. And if we’re able to do it there, it means that you’re able to do it in other parts of the city, thus underscoring the fight for public education. If we have the resources to have good schools, we can have great schools everywhere in the city of Chicago, and educational equity.

AMYGOODMAN: Speaking of education, we interviewed Karen Lewis several times, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, and she told us about a private meeting she had with Mayor Rahm Emanuel. This was back in 2012 we had this discussion. The meeting was about the city’s plan to shut down seven schools and fire all the teachers at 10 other schools.

KARENLEWIS: When I first met him, we had dinner together, and he said, "Well, you know, 25 percent of these kids are never going to be anything. They’re never going to amount to anything. And I’m not throwing money at it." And I was like, "Wow! You know, even if you believe that, you can’t say that to me." So, I just watch how he has used black and brown and poor children as props to push an agenda that is all about privatization and all about so-called accountability, but it’s really the status quo, because once schools get put on probation here in Chicago, the Chicago Public Schools takes over, takes away the democratically controlled local school councils, takes that power away from them to hire and fire and evaluate principals and to spend discretionary funds. So, we see this culture of punishment and culture of disinvestment, and it is rampant and obviously spreading throughout the country.

AMYGOODMAN: That’s the former head of the teachers union, Karen Lewis. Talking to The Daily Beast at the Democratic convention that same year, in 2012, Chicago Mayor Emanuel defended the city’s proposed education reform.

MAYORRAHMEMANUEL: I started school yesterday at three different schools where Chicago started school day. After a decade of discussing it, we now finally have the full school day and full school year. We cheated our children for over a decade an hour and 15 minutes every day, two weeks out of the year. That used to be things that we didn’t give our children. Now we’re giving that.

DAILYBEASTREPORTER: Didn’t make you popular with the teachers unions, obviously.

MAYORRAHMEMANUEL: But I know what it’s going to do for children’s lives.

DAILYBEASTREPORTER: All right, Rahm Manuel, [inaudible].

MAYORRAHMEMANUEL: No, but—no, no, wait a second. Number two—yeah, this school year, the core curriculum, the most rigorous academic standards. This year, five new science and technology and math high schools, that go all the way through community college, don’t stop in high school. They go to two years community college, so it’s 19—14th grade, associated with five of the top technology companies of the country. We also added 6,000 kids to magnet schools, 6,000 kids to early childhood pre-K, as well as kindergarten programs. And we also now made available to parents for the first time online—every principal used to get a report card on their school how it was doing. We never gave it to the parents. You can’t ask for parent involvement who don’t get information. The most comprehensive, sweeping reform in schools. And why? Because if I get those kids educated, they have a future.

AMYGOODMAN: So that’s Rahm Emanuel speaking in 2012 and, before that, Karen Lewis, the head of the teachers union, who might well have run against Rahm Emanuel this year, but she was diagnosed with brain cancer. And, Chuy, she turned to you, is that right?

JESÚS "CHUY" GARCÍA: Yes. She approached me shortly after she came home after her surgery, her brain surgery that removed a tumor, and she asked me if I would consider running for mayor of Chicago. She didn’t just ask me; she said, "You’ve got to step up, and you have to do this." And I asked her, "Well, why are you asking me? I’m headed to a re-election victory without an opponent, first time in my life." And she said, "You have a history. You have been a coalition builder. You have been a steady progressive over three decades in Chicago. You have relationships across the city. You can build a multiracial, multiethnic coalition across state. And this is the time for you to step up. The city needs you. And I hope that you’ll consider it." So I went home and talked to my wife. And we slept on it, we prayed on it, we contemplated it, and we asked for inspiration. And, of course, I decided to step up.

And here we are, a month out from a runoff election, having denied the mayor a re-election bid in his first effort and, of course, shaking things up in Chicago, saying that the neighborhoods in Chicago will be addressed. The neighborhoods in Chicago deserve a voice. We want to put an end to the mayor’s style and approach and policies in Chicago, to favoring a select few, giving tax breaks and tax incentives of our property tax dollars to rich corporations and wealthy individuals. We want democracy in Chicago. We want change. The voters, 55 percent of them, voted for change a week ago last Tuesday, on February 24th. That is unprecedented in Chicago. Folks thought that this was a conventional election. It has not been conventional whatsoever. Even though only 33 percent of the voters turned out, a majority of them voted for change.

And we’re now in a dead heat as we approach April 7. There’s a fight here for the heart and soul of Chicago. This is about whether Chicago will be a city that is inclusive of all of its people or whether it will continue to work for a select few of rich and powerful people. We overcame the money deficit. They threw everything that they had—negative ads, a barrage of propaganda. They outspent us 12 to one. But Chicagoans were clear on what they wanted: They wanted change. And thus Chicago is now at the forefront of a national debate about how you govern. Do you continue to let the powerful interests run your city, or do citizens fight back, unite and demonstrate that they can have a voice, they can chart a new course that is inclusive of the interests of all the people of Chicago?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Chuy García, you mentioned this whole issue of the favored treatment of the city’s elite. I want to read from a Chicago Tribuneinvestigation of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his top 100 donors, that found, quote, "a pattern of mutually beneficial interactions between the mayor and his major supporters. ... Nearly 60 percent of those 103 donors benefited from his city government, receiving contracts, zoning changes, business permits, pension work, board appointments, regulatory help or some other tangible benefit." Yet, despite this, the Chicago Tribune went on to endorse Emanuel for mayor. This whole issue of pay to play, could you talk about that?

JESÚS "CHUY" GARCÍA: Well, you know, as you pointed out, Juan, the two-part series that showed a clear pattern of pay to play, unethical conduct, of favoring the rich and powerful in Chicago, came out the Sunday and Monday of February 1st, 2nd. By the end of the week, they had endorsed the mayor for re-election. So it’s highly ironic that that took place. But, you know, you have to understand, you know, Chicago and who favors a mayor like Rahm Emanuel. I think it’s, you know, highly ironic that that happened, but at any rate, it didn’t affect people’s understanding of how they fare under this mayor. There have been many, many instances of those types of abuses and conflicts of interest. But Chicagoans want change. They voted for change. And as we move to April 7, they will get change.

We will generate even a stronger troop base in Chicago, a wonderful coalition that will overcome the 1 percent and all the rich and wealthy folks who want to keep Chicago working for the select few. The coalition will grow. This will be a tremendous battle that will also put Chicago at the forefront in terms of an agenda in what cities all over the country need. They need the attention of the federal government. We need to address our crumbling infrastructure system. We need more support from Washington, D.C. In order to address the violence in our cities, the disinvestment in many Chicago neighborhoods, we need a national work program that will enable us to put young men, in particular, and women in many parts of the city back to work so that we can have neighborhood revitalization. You can’t have successful neighborhood revitalization in some of Chicago’s poorest communities, especially the African-American community on the West Side and on the South Side, if you don’t put people back to work. These—

AMYGOODMAN: Chuy García, we don’t have much time, but I want to stay on this issue of African-American community and also the Latino community. In 1987, you spoke at the funeral of former Mayor Harold Washington, who became the first African-American mayor in Chicago in 1983. This is a clip of what you said.

JESÚS "CHUY" GARCÍA: To learn what makes us go, there’s no place you wouldn’t go, from the beaches of San Juan to the mountains of Mexico. And now that you’ve gone, we, the people, vow to stay strong. The unity of our coalition is a tribute to the Washington tradition. Today, today in '87, we know that you're in heaven. Adiós, amigo. Adiós.

AMYGOODMAN: Chuy García, speaking at the funeral of former Mayor Harold Washington. For those watching on TV, you also saw a flash to Luis Gutiérrez. And I want to talk about the black-brown coalition of Chicago. Luis Gutiérrez, who is the first Midwestern Latino congressmember ever to be elected, is actually endorsing Mayor Emanuel. I wanted to get your comment on that and also how you will pick up support within the African-American community.

JESÚS "CHUY" GARCÍA: Well, first, to my old friend, Luis Gutiérrez, he apparently committed to the re-election of the mayor some time ago. They did serve together in Congress. There is a relationship there. I think the conventional thinking in Chicago was that Rahm Emanuel would coast to an easy re-election victory. But that was overlooking some of the major issues in Chicago—the school closings, the levels of violence, the disinvestment in many of the neighborhoods. It’s unfortunate that my old friend Luis Gutiérrez could not be with me in this election.

Nevertheless, in Chicago there is a real desire on the part of people everywhere—in the African-American community, in the Latino community, in working-class white communities—to want to come together and establish a new path for Chicago that is rooted in greater equity, that recognizes that we are each other’s future, and unless all of us have a voice and say-so in how our government is led, that we cannot have a sustainable city. In order for Chicago to be a truly world-class city, a truly great city, it needs to have great neighborhoods. You can’t have great neighborhoods unless you have good public education, good public schools within reach of those neighborhood residents. And we have to reduce our terrible violence in many of the neighborhoods in Chicago. Ten thousand shootings over the past four years is intolerable. We need a mayor who will be about the neighborhoods, who will have the disposition, the willingness to sit with neighborhood residents, who will be receptive to the need for mental health services in many of the neighborhoods in the city of Chicago. So, a mayor who is really in tune with ordinary people, with Chicago neighborhoods and with working people in Chicago is what residents in Chicago have said they want. And I intend to be that mayor for all of Chicago.

AMYGOODMAN: Jesús "Chuy" García, we want to thank you very much for being with us, running for mayor of Chicago, after—a runoff election that is set for April 7th.

JESÚS "CHUY" GARCÍA: Thank you, Amy and Juan.

AMYGOODMAN: He is running against Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Thanks so much.

JESÚS "CHUY" GARCÍA: Thank you.

AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we head north to Massachusetts to talk about the Boston Marathon bombing trial. Stay with us.

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Fri, 06 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0500Newly Sworn-In 113th Congress Is the Most Diverse in History, But Not the Most Progressivehttp://www.democracynow.org/2013/1/4/newly_sworn_in_113th_congress_is
tag:democracynow.org,2013-01-04:en/story/0d2fa0 JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We begin today&#8217;s show with the new Congress, the most diverse in the nation&#8217;s history with a record number of women and minority members. The House now has 81 women, 61 of them Democrats, while the new Senate includes 20 women. There will be 44 African Americans in the House and one in the Senate. The Congress also includes nine new Latino members, making it the largest Latino class in history, with 28 House seats and three Senate seats, two of whom are Republican. The 113th Congress includes the first openly gay senator, Democrat Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin. The first open bisexual was also elected to the House, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. For the first time, white men will be a minority among House Democrats.
The new crop of lawmakers was sworn into office Thursday, with House Speaker John Boehner re-elected to his post amidst the prospect of more budget battles with the White House.
SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER : As speaker, I pledge to listen and to do all I can to help all of you carry out your oath of office that we are about—all about to take. Because in our hearts we know it&#8217;s wrong to pass this debt onto our kids and our grandkids, now we have to be willing, truly willing, to make this problem right.
AMY GOODMAN : To find out more about the new Congress, we&#8217;re joined via Democracy Now! video stream by John Nichols, political writer for The Nation , author of Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street . He joins us from Madison, Wisconsin.
John, welcome to Democracy Now! Your assessment of the new Congress?
JOHN NICHOLS : Well, as Juan was suggesting—excuse me—as Juan was suggesting, it really is a different Congress. This is a much more diverse Congress. And notably, it&#8217;s a more progressive Congress, particularly the Senate. The changes that occurred in the Senate in particular seats, even seats that had been held by Democrats, have moved it to the left. And so, it&#8217;s a Congress that has the potential to do some things that weren&#8217;t done in the past.
But it is also a very vulnerable Congress. The important thing to understand is this: This is a divided Congress. The House is minimally controlled by the Republicans. It&#8217;s important to say the term &quot;minimally&quot; because there&#8217;s a lot of chaos in that Republican caucus. The Senate is clearly under Democratic control, but that Democratic control has very little meaning without filibuster reform. And this is perhaps the most important thing we&#8217;ll discuss today. If the Democrats want to actually exercise some sort of power, and if they want to be able to negotiate with the Republican House in some sort of realistic way, they are going to have to reform the filibuster rules so that they can&#8217;t be blocked at every turn, even in bringing bills to a vote.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But now, John, the Senate, which initially had said it was going to move quickly to reform the rules on filibustering, didn&#8217;t do that. What do you see as the prospects over the next few weeks of reforms in the rules of the Senate?
JOHN NICHOLS : Juan, I&#8217;m very concerned about that delay. They could have made the changes yesterday. They could have begun to do the process right away, and that&#8217;s historically how it should be done. The Senate sets its own rules. They are established on the first day of session. What Harry Reid did, the majority leader, was to extend the first day. He essentially used a parliamentary maneuver, so that filibuster reform can be done up to, say, around January 22nd, January 23rd. And so he&#8217;s held the door open. But the concern I have is that Reid, a handful of moderate Democrats and the Republicans will negotiate a filibuster reform that is not real reform, that will effectively allow the delaying tactics, the behind-closed-door maneuvers, to continue. I cannot emphasize, if that is the case, then it is very likely that we&#8217;ll continue to see an exceptionally gridlocked Congress.
AMY GOODMAN : Talk about the close race, the speaker&#8217;s race being a squeaker yesterday for John Boehner—tremendous wrath he invoked on both party sides when he didn&#8217;t pass the Superstorm Sandy relief bill right away. There&#8217;s going to be a vote today and a vote in a week or so. But talk about John Boehner&#8217;s control over his party, what he represents. Who are the powers that are pushing him?
JOHN NICHOLS : John Boehner has authority because he is weak, not because he is strong. That&#8217;s the important thing to understand. He was allowed to remain as speaker of an exceptionally divided and contentious Republican caucus because they all believed that they could push him around. And that&#8217;s a very important thing to understand. He does not come into his speakership for this term with any sort of mandate—in fact, quite the opposite. His own caucus has deep divisions between a Northeastern bloc, which you referenced, which is very, very concerned not just about Sandy, but, as Peter King just mentioned this morning, things such as the assault weapons ban. You have Republicans within that caucus who want to work with the Obama administration on a number of issues. And then, on the other side, you&#8217;ve got a tea party faction, which is much larger, that really does not want to work with the president at all, that is apparently quite confident in the power of both gridlock and [inaudible] actual chaos as somehow their best route to getting an extended stint in power. And so, what Boehner is doing is sort of trying to ride on top of all of this.
He had a near fiasco yesterday. For a few minutes, it appeared that the hard right within his caucus, a faction of very extreme budget hawks, might garner enough votes to prevent him from winning the speakership on the first ballot. Now that wouldn&#8217;t have knocked him out as speaker; there would have been a second vote. But he actually only won the speakership by two votes more than the majority in the House, which is quite a remarkably close thing.
But it&#8217;s also—that—if I can add, that&#8217;s an important reminder of how narrowly divided the House of Representatives now is. We cover elections horribly in America, and so we tend to presume that the results that come out on election night are definitional. The reality is that votes keep getting counted. And as the results have come in from states like Arizona and California, we&#8217;ve seen many Republican seats fall to the Democrats. So, Boehner&#8217;s majority is much smaller. His legitimacy is also much reduced, because the plurality of voters who cast ballots on November 6 voted for a Democratic House of Representatives. They only got a Republican House because of gerrymandering in the redistricting process and the massive expenditures by Karl Rove&#8217;s operations, as well as the concentration of Democratic votes in some urban areas.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And John, obviously, in this more diverse Congress than ever, the numbers of African Americans and Latinos serving in both the House and the Senate are really at record levels. And yet, we&#8217;ve come through a period of time where the attention of Congress to issues of racial inequity has perhaps been lower than it has been in decades. What do you see as the prospects, as obviously immigration reform will be on the table, for any kind of substantive change in this area by the new Congress?
JOHN NICHOLS : Juan, you go to the heart of the matter: Is this Congress truly representative of the American people, their desires and their diversity? It&#8217;s beginning to get better, in some ways, but I think we have to be very, very cautious about presuming that simply having a more diverse Congress means that we&#8217;re going to get better results. Clearly, the diversity is important, and it&#8217;s not just racial and ethnic. We also have a great deal more religious diversity. The Congress now has two Buddhists, a Hindu, several Muslims. And so, it is becoming more diverse in all sorts of very important ways. But that diversity is very much concentrated in the Democratic caucuses.
And so, if you&#8217;re to have real progress in this Congress, you have to start to look at procedural actions. And I would emphasize two things. First off, that filibuster reform that I mentioned before, that allows the Senate to be functional, to actually pass bills and to effectively negotiate with the House. In the House of Representatives, I think President Obama has some responsibilities. He has to reach out to more moderate, or at least moderately conservative and responsible, Republicans and try to foster the creation of a get-things-done caucus, if you will, that includes both Democrats and some Republicans. If he does that, say, on the assault weapons ban and perhaps on immigration reform, he could get some real things done. But it will not happen organically within the House of Representatives. There&#8217;s going to have to be some pressure from the top, perhaps even the president going on the road into some of these congressional districts of the somewhat more moderate Republicans.
AMY GOODMAN : First African-American senator, a Republican from South Carolina.
JOHN NICHOLS : Yeah, well, first in [inaudible], although it&#8217;s important to remember that we had a very, very liberal African-American senator from Massachusetts elected in 1966, Edward Brooke. Tim Scott from South Carolina is the first African-American senator from the South since Reconstruction. He is exceptionally conservative and much like a Herman Cain. He reinforces many of the tea party&#8217;s messages. I do not see him emerging as a particularly distinct figure outside of the tea party messaging, but he will be a part of that. It&#8217;s also significant, Marco Rubio from Florida, perhaps a more significant player, and perhaps Ted Cruz from Texas, both Latinos, who could become key players on immigration reform. That is—there is diversity within the Republican caucus. And what you want to look at with those folks is, are there places where they will begin to educate and move their caucus, which has tended toward some very reactionary positions, at least moderately toward the center?
AMY GOODMAN : And from your own state, Wisconsin, the first openly gay senator, Tammy Baldwin.
JOHN NICHOLS : Indeed. It&#8217;s quite remarkable. Tammy Baldwin, who is not merely—although it&#8217;s certainly significant—the first openly lesbian or gay senator, the first out-of-the-closet lesbian or gay to be elected throughout her career as such—really remarkable progress—but also the fact that she&#8217;s a committed progressive. She was a member of the House and Progressive Congressional Caucus. She voted against the Iraq war, against the PATRIOT Act, against getting rid of Glass-Steagall. Having somebody like that go into the Senate means that Bernie Sanders is going to have a real ally there. And Tammy Baldwin&#8217;s seat was taken by a gentleman named Mark Pocan, who is an out gay man, who is married to his partner, went to Canada to get married, and is, again, an absolute committed progressive, joining the Progressive Caucus.
And so, what we&#8217;re seeing is that this diversity, with African Americans, Latinos, gays and lesbians coming into the Congress, many of them—not all, but many of them—are coming as broad-spectrum progressives who are—who recognize the importance of connecting all sorts of liberation movements. And this is a really big deal. I think these are folks we&#8217;re going to look to to be real leaders in the new Congress on the progressive issues that have to be raised.
AMY GOODMAN : John Nichols, we want to thank you for being with us, political writer for The Nation , author of Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street , speaking to us from his home in Madison, Wisconsin.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, will the New York governor lift a ban on fracking, a moratorium on fracking? We&#8217;ll have a debate on the controversial practice. Stay with us. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We begin today’s show with the new Congress, the most diverse in the nation’s history with a record number of women and minority members. The House now has 81 women, 61 of them Democrats, while the new Senate includes 20 women. There will be 44 African Americans in the House and one in the Senate. The Congress also includes nine new Latino members, making it the largest Latino class in history, with 28 House seats and three Senate seats, two of whom are Republican. The 113th Congress includes the first openly gay senator, Democrat Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin. The first open bisexual was also elected to the House, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. For the first time, white men will be a minority among House Democrats.

The new crop of lawmakers was sworn into office Thursday, with House Speaker John Boehner re-elected to his post amidst the prospect of more budget battles with the White House.

SPEAKERJOHNBOEHNER: As speaker, I pledge to listen and to do all I can to help all of you carry out your oath of office that we are about—all about to take. Because in our hearts we know it’s wrong to pass this debt onto our kids and our grandkids, now we have to be willing, truly willing, to make this problem right.

AMYGOODMAN: To find out more about the new Congress, we’re joined via Democracy Now! video stream by John Nichols, political writer for The Nation, author of Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street. He joins us from Madison, Wisconsin.

John, welcome to Democracy Now! Your assessment of the new Congress?

JOHNNICHOLS: Well, as Juan was suggesting—excuse me—as Juan was suggesting, it really is a different Congress. This is a much more diverse Congress. And notably, it’s a more progressive Congress, particularly the Senate. The changes that occurred in the Senate in particular seats, even seats that had been held by Democrats, have moved it to the left. And so, it’s a Congress that has the potential to do some things that weren’t done in the past.

But it is also a very vulnerable Congress. The important thing to understand is this: This is a divided Congress. The House is minimally controlled by the Republicans. It’s important to say the term "minimally" because there’s a lot of chaos in that Republican caucus. The Senate is clearly under Democratic control, but that Democratic control has very little meaning without filibuster reform. And this is perhaps the most important thing we’ll discuss today. If the Democrats want to actually exercise some sort of power, and if they want to be able to negotiate with the Republican House in some sort of realistic way, they are going to have to reform the filibuster rules so that they can’t be blocked at every turn, even in bringing bills to a vote.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But now, John, the Senate, which initially had said it was going to move quickly to reform the rules on filibustering, didn’t do that. What do you see as the prospects over the next few weeks of reforms in the rules of the Senate?

JOHNNICHOLS: Juan, I’m very concerned about that delay. They could have made the changes yesterday. They could have begun to do the process right away, and that’s historically how it should be done. The Senate sets its own rules. They are established on the first day of session. What Harry Reid did, the majority leader, was to extend the first day. He essentially used a parliamentary maneuver, so that filibuster reform can be done up to, say, around January 22nd, January 23rd. And so he’s held the door open. But the concern I have is that Reid, a handful of moderate Democrats and the Republicans will negotiate a filibuster reform that is not real reform, that will effectively allow the delaying tactics, the behind-closed-door maneuvers, to continue. I cannot emphasize, if that is the case, then it is very likely that we’ll continue to see an exceptionally gridlocked Congress.

AMYGOODMAN: Talk about the close race, the speaker’s race being a squeaker yesterday for John Boehner—tremendous wrath he invoked on both party sides when he didn’t pass the Superstorm Sandy relief bill right away. There’s going to be a vote today and a vote in a week or so. But talk about John Boehner’s control over his party, what he represents. Who are the powers that are pushing him?

JOHNNICHOLS: John Boehner has authority because he is weak, not because he is strong. That’s the important thing to understand. He was allowed to remain as speaker of an exceptionally divided and contentious Republican caucus because they all believed that they could push him around. And that’s a very important thing to understand. He does not come into his speakership for this term with any sort of mandate—in fact, quite the opposite. His own caucus has deep divisions between a Northeastern bloc, which you referenced, which is very, very concerned not just about Sandy, but, as Peter King just mentioned this morning, things such as the assault weapons ban. You have Republicans within that caucus who want to work with the Obama administration on a number of issues. And then, on the other side, you’ve got a tea party faction, which is much larger, that really does not want to work with the president at all, that is apparently quite confident in the power of both gridlock and [inaudible] actual chaos as somehow their best route to getting an extended stint in power. And so, what Boehner is doing is sort of trying to ride on top of all of this.

He had a near fiasco yesterday. For a few minutes, it appeared that the hard right within his caucus, a faction of very extreme budget hawks, might garner enough votes to prevent him from winning the speakership on the first ballot. Now that wouldn’t have knocked him out as speaker; there would have been a second vote. But he actually only won the speakership by two votes more than the majority in the House, which is quite a remarkably close thing.

But it’s also—that—if I can add, that’s an important reminder of how narrowly divided the House of Representatives now is. We cover elections horribly in America, and so we tend to presume that the results that come out on election night are definitional. The reality is that votes keep getting counted. And as the results have come in from states like Arizona and California, we’ve seen many Republican seats fall to the Democrats. So, Boehner’s majority is much smaller. His legitimacy is also much reduced, because the plurality of voters who cast ballots on November 6 voted for a Democratic House of Representatives. They only got a Republican House because of gerrymandering in the redistricting process and the massive expenditures by Karl Rove’s operations, as well as the concentration of Democratic votes in some urban areas.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And John, obviously, in this more diverse Congress than ever, the numbers of African Americans and Latinos serving in both the House and the Senate are really at record levels. And yet, we’ve come through a period of time where the attention of Congress to issues of racial inequity has perhaps been lower than it has been in decades. What do you see as the prospects, as obviously immigration reform will be on the table, for any kind of substantive change in this area by the new Congress?

JOHNNICHOLS: Juan, you go to the heart of the matter: Is this Congress truly representative of the American people, their desires and their diversity? It’s beginning to get better, in some ways, but I think we have to be very, very cautious about presuming that simply having a more diverse Congress means that we’re going to get better results. Clearly, the diversity is important, and it’s not just racial and ethnic. We also have a great deal more religious diversity. The Congress now has two Buddhists, a Hindu, several Muslims. And so, it is becoming more diverse in all sorts of very important ways. But that diversity is very much concentrated in the Democratic caucuses.

And so, if you’re to have real progress in this Congress, you have to start to look at procedural actions. And I would emphasize two things. First off, that filibuster reform that I mentioned before, that allows the Senate to be functional, to actually pass bills and to effectively negotiate with the House. In the House of Representatives, I think President Obama has some responsibilities. He has to reach out to more moderate, or at least moderately conservative and responsible, Republicans and try to foster the creation of a get-things-done caucus, if you will, that includes both Democrats and some Republicans. If he does that, say, on the assault weapons ban and perhaps on immigration reform, he could get some real things done. But it will not happen organically within the House of Representatives. There’s going to have to be some pressure from the top, perhaps even the president going on the road into some of these congressional districts of the somewhat more moderate Republicans.

AMYGOODMAN: First African-American senator, a Republican from South Carolina.

JOHNNICHOLS: Yeah, well, first in [inaudible], although it’s important to remember that we had a very, very liberal African-American senator from Massachusetts elected in 1966, Edward Brooke. Tim Scott from South Carolina is the first African-American senator from the South since Reconstruction. He is exceptionally conservative and much like a Herman Cain. He reinforces many of the tea party’s messages. I do not see him emerging as a particularly distinct figure outside of the tea party messaging, but he will be a part of that. It’s also significant, Marco Rubio from Florida, perhaps a more significant player, and perhaps Ted Cruz from Texas, both Latinos, who could become key players on immigration reform. That is—there is diversity within the Republican caucus. And what you want to look at with those folks is, are there places where they will begin to educate and move their caucus, which has tended toward some very reactionary positions, at least moderately toward the center?

AMYGOODMAN: And from your own state, Wisconsin, the first openly gay senator, Tammy Baldwin.

JOHNNICHOLS: Indeed. It’s quite remarkable. Tammy Baldwin, who is not merely—although it’s certainly significant—the first openly lesbian or gay senator, the first out-of-the-closet lesbian or gay to be elected throughout her career as such—really remarkable progress—but also the fact that she’s a committed progressive. She was a member of the House and Progressive Congressional Caucus. She voted against the Iraq war, against the PATRIOT Act, against getting rid of Glass-Steagall. Having somebody like that go into the Senate means that Bernie Sanders is going to have a real ally there. And Tammy Baldwin’s seat was taken by a gentleman named Mark Pocan, who is an out gay man, who is married to his partner, went to Canada to get married, and is, again, an absolute committed progressive, joining the Progressive Caucus.

And so, what we’re seeing is that this diversity, with African Americans, Latinos, gays and lesbians coming into the Congress, many of them—not all, but many of them—are coming as broad-spectrum progressives who are—who recognize the importance of connecting all sorts of liberation movements. And this is a really big deal. I think these are folks we’re going to look to to be real leaders in the new Congress on the progressive issues that have to be raised.

AMYGOODMAN: John Nichols, we want to thank you for being with us, political writer for The Nation, author of Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street, speaking to us from his home in Madison, Wisconsin.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, will the New York governor lift a ban on fracking, a moratorium on fracking? We’ll have a debate on the controversial practice. Stay with us.

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Fri, 04 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500George McGovern Dies at 90: Remembering Democratic Senator, Antiwar Candidate's Life and Legacyhttp://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/22/george_mcgovern_dies_at_90_remembering
tag:democracynow.org,2012-10-22:en/story/e47b05 AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I&#8217;m Amy Goodman at the Community Media Center of Marin in San Rafael, California.
Memorial services are scheduled to begin Thursday in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for former Democratic senator and presidential candidate George McGovern. He died Sunday at the age of 90. Senator McGovern is best known for running against Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election on a platform of withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam, reducing defense spending, providing amnesty to those who evaded the draft. On Election Day, McGovern won only one state, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia. Within two years, Nixon would become the first U.S. president to resign. McGovern served in the Senate from 1963 to 1981.
On Friday , we aired extended excerpts of the 2005 documentary, One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern . In a moment, we&#8217;ll be joined by the film&#8217;s director, Stephen Vittoria, but first we go back to George McGovern&#8217;s 1972 speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination.
SEN . GEORGE McGOVERN: And this is also a time, not for death, but for life. In 1968, many Americans thought they were voting to bring our sons home from Vietnam in peace, and since then 20,000 of our sons have come home in coffins. I have no secret plan for peace; I have a public plan. And as one whose heart has ached for the past 10 years over the agony of Vietnam, I will halt the senseless bombing of Indochina on inaugural day. There will be no more Asian children running ablaze from bombed-out schools. There will be no more talk of bombing the dikes or the cities of the North. And within 90 days of my inauguration, every American soldier and every American prisoner will be out of the jungle and out of their cells and back home in America where they belong. Then—and then let us resolve that never again will we send the precious young blood of this country to die trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad.
AMY GOODMAN : The late George McGovern at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. With us here in San Rafael, California, Stephen Vittoria, director of the 2005 documentary, One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern .
Steve Vittoria, in addition to doing the documentary, you came close to Senator McGovern. Give us a thumbnail sketch of George McGovern&#8217;s life.
STEPHEN VITTORIA : Well, first, Amy, I want to thank you and Democracy Now! for embracing George McGovern&#8217;s life and legacy. For 40 or 50 years, the right wing in this country, along with the so-called &quot;liberal&quot; corporate media has stomped all over his character. And the man spent his life fighting for peace, fighting for justice, fighting to feed people. So this is a great example of independent media speaking truth to power. So thank you.
I became very close with George McGovern. I didn&#8217;t want to make the film unless he was behind making the film. It would have been very difficult to do the film without him. We&#8217;re going to talk about my Mumia film. That was very difficult to do the film without Mumia.
But George was—he was an—just an amazing politician, in that he came from a state, South Dakota, that was incredibly conservative. In the 1950s, it was a one-party state: Republican. And he and his wife Eleanor, for years, crisscrossed that state together and literally brought back a moribund Democratic Party and created two-party politics in South Dakota. I know we want three- and four-party politics, but he had to get two-party politics first. And he became a congressman in 1956.
And right from the very beginning, he was—he was somebody that just bucked the system constantly. He bucked the system when John F. Kennedy was president, with Fidel Castro—he thought America had a Castro fixation. And as we know, George McGovern was also the earliest and probably most trenchant voice against the Vietnam War.
AMY GOODMAN : Was he opposed to the embargo against Cuba?
STEPHEN VITTORIA : I do not know. I don&#8217;t know.
AMY GOODMAN : The Vietnam War, talk about his growing activism against it. Was he against the war from the beginning?
STEPHEN VITTORIA : He was very much against the war from the beginning. He did in fact vote for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and it&#8217;s a vote that George, to his dying day, regretted making. There are only two senators that voted against that Gulf of Tonkin Resolution: Morse and Gruening. And George told us in the film, and he told me on many occasions, that he should have never believed what he was being told by both the Kennedy and the Johnson White House.
AMY GOODMAN : Which was?
STEPHEN VITTORIA : Which was that this was going to be a kind of a humanitarian effort, it was going to be quick, and that the Gulf of Tonkin was just to make sure that the soldiers had what they needed.
AMY GOODMAN : His speeches, some of the most powerful against the war, saying another American boy should not die for a foreign dictator.
STEPHEN VITTORIA : That&#8217;s right. And one of George&#8217;s most famous quotes was &quot;I&#8217;m sick and tired of old men dreaming up new wars for young men to die in.&quot; And, you know, I think he was—that was something that he held very, very tight his whole life.
AMY GOODMAN : You spent a lot of time talking to Senator McGovern.
STEPHEN VITTORIA : I did.
AMY GOODMAN : What did you learn about him that maybe others don&#8217;t know?
STEPHEN VITTORIA : In World War II, George McGovern was a decorated bomber pilot. He flew 35 missions over Nazi-occupied Germany, when the average lifespan of a crew was about 17 or 18 bombing missions. Very much like Howard Zinn, after the war he had incredible nightmares and guilt about, from the wild blue yonder, what his bombs were doing to the people on the ground. And George lived with that. And I think, obviously, that was one of the main reasons that he had this antiwar stance throughout his entire career.
He told me—we were in a car on the way to breakfast in Montauk on Long Island at the Hamptons Film Festival, and I felt like he wanted to share something with me. It was almost like a mea culpa . And he told me that he honestly believed that he was a pacifist and that, for an American politician, that&#8217;s not the kind of thing that you want to roll out in front of the American public. At that time, George was 83, 84, 85 years old. And I said to him, &quot;George, what—what the hell&#8217;s the difference right now? You&#8217;re not running for anything. This would be a remarkable—a remarkable statement for you to make, and to kind of, you know, just go that extra few yards.&quot; But he wanted to hold on, I think, to the valor and the glory of what he considered to be the good war. And—but I know, stealing the title from David Swanson&#8217;s book, War Is a Lie , that George completely believed that war is a lie.
AMY GOODMAN : One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern . Why do you say &quot;forgotten&quot;? And what do you think are the lessons that Democratic candidates of the future took from George McGovern, since he won only one state plus the District of Columbia? He won Massachusetts.
STEPHEN VITTORIA : Yeah. It truly felt to me like it was the forgotten summer of George McGovern. I was a teenager at the time, and I worked very hard on the campaign—couldn&#8217;t vote for him, but I worked for him. And, you know, there were—I believe the 1960s, the social revolutions of the 1960s, absolutely came to an end in 1972. The people that cut their teeth on the antiwar movement and civil rights movement, the women&#8217;s movement, they came together on George McGovern&#8217;s campaign.
And I&#8217;ll give you two examples, kind of a tale of two cities, people that came out of that—those campaigns, and you can see why it was the forgotten summer. On the negative side, you had Bill and Hillary Clinton, who both worked tirelessly for George McGovern. And here we are all these years later, and it seems like Bill and Hillary Clinton are kind of hit men for the Mob. It doesn&#8217;t seem like they learned anything from the George McGovern campaign or from the 1960s. Michael Moore, on the other hand, worked tirelessly for George McGovern, and we see what he did with that campaign and what he learned in that campaign, and he took the ideas of fighting war, fighting hatred, fighting poverty, and he&#8217;s put it to work in his career, he&#8217;s put it to work in his films. So, there were an awful lot of people who kind of sold out from the George McGovern campaign, and it truly was a forgotten summer. A few people held on to it. AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman at the Community Media Center of Marin in San Rafael, California.

Memorial services are scheduled to begin Thursday in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for former Democratic senator and presidential candidate George McGovern. He died Sunday at the age of 90. Senator McGovern is best known for running against Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election on a platform of withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam, reducing defense spending, providing amnesty to those who evaded the draft. On Election Day, McGovern won only one state, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia. Within two years, Nixon would become the first U.S. president to resign. McGovern served in the Senate from 1963 to 1981.

On Friday, we aired extended excerpts of the 2005 documentary, One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern. In a moment, we’ll be joined by the film’s director, Stephen Vittoria, but first we go back to George McGovern’s 1972 speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination.

SEN. GEORGE McGOVERN: And this is also a time, not for death, but for life. In 1968, many Americans thought they were voting to bring our sons home from Vietnam in peace, and since then 20,000 of our sons have come home in coffins. I have no secret plan for peace; I have a public plan. And as one whose heart has ached for the past 10 years over the agony of Vietnam, I will halt the senseless bombing of Indochina on inaugural day. There will be no more Asian children running ablaze from bombed-out schools. There will be no more talk of bombing the dikes or the cities of the North. And within 90 days of my inauguration, every American soldier and every American prisoner will be out of the jungle and out of their cells and back home in America where they belong. Then—and then let us resolve that never again will we send the precious young blood of this country to die trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad.

AMYGOODMAN: The late George McGovern at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. With us here in San Rafael, California, Stephen Vittoria, director of the 2005 documentary, One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern.

Steve Vittoria, in addition to doing the documentary, you came close to Senator McGovern. Give us a thumbnail sketch of George McGovern’s life.

STEPHENVITTORIA: Well, first, Amy, I want to thank you and Democracy Now! for embracing George McGovern’s life and legacy. For 40 or 50 years, the right wing in this country, along with the so-called "liberal" corporate media has stomped all over his character. And the man spent his life fighting for peace, fighting for justice, fighting to feed people. So this is a great example of independent media speaking truth to power. So thank you.

I became very close with George McGovern. I didn’t want to make the film unless he was behind making the film. It would have been very difficult to do the film without him. We’re going to talk about my Mumia film. That was very difficult to do the film without Mumia.

But George was—he was an—just an amazing politician, in that he came from a state, South Dakota, that was incredibly conservative. In the 1950s, it was a one-party state: Republican. And he and his wife Eleanor, for years, crisscrossed that state together and literally brought back a moribund Democratic Party and created two-party politics in South Dakota. I know we want three- and four-party politics, but he had to get two-party politics first. And he became a congressman in 1956.

And right from the very beginning, he was—he was somebody that just bucked the system constantly. He bucked the system when John F. Kennedy was president, with Fidel Castro—he thought America had a Castro fixation. And as we know, George McGovern was also the earliest and probably most trenchant voice against the Vietnam War.

AMYGOODMAN: Was he opposed to the embargo against Cuba?

STEPHENVITTORIA: I do not know. I don’t know.

AMYGOODMAN: The Vietnam War, talk about his growing activism against it. Was he against the war from the beginning?

STEPHENVITTORIA: He was very much against the war from the beginning. He did in fact vote for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and it’s a vote that George, to his dying day, regretted making. There are only two senators that voted against that Gulf of Tonkin Resolution: Morse and Gruening. And George told us in the film, and he told me on many occasions, that he should have never believed what he was being told by both the Kennedy and the Johnson White House.

AMYGOODMAN: Which was?

STEPHENVITTORIA: Which was that this was going to be a kind of a humanitarian effort, it was going to be quick, and that the Gulf of Tonkin was just to make sure that the soldiers had what they needed.

AMYGOODMAN: His speeches, some of the most powerful against the war, saying another American boy should not die for a foreign dictator.

STEPHENVITTORIA: That’s right. And one of George’s most famous quotes was "I’m sick and tired of old men dreaming up new wars for young men to die in." And, you know, I think he was—that was something that he held very, very tight his whole life.

AMYGOODMAN: You spent a lot of time talking to Senator McGovern.

STEPHENVITTORIA: I did.

AMYGOODMAN: What did you learn about him that maybe others don’t know?

STEPHENVITTORIA: In World War II, George McGovern was a decorated bomber pilot. He flew 35 missions over Nazi-occupied Germany, when the average lifespan of a crew was about 17 or 18 bombing missions. Very much like Howard Zinn, after the war he had incredible nightmares and guilt about, from the wild blue yonder, what his bombs were doing to the people on the ground. And George lived with that. And I think, obviously, that was one of the main reasons that he had this antiwar stance throughout his entire career.

He told me—we were in a car on the way to breakfast in Montauk on Long Island at the Hamptons Film Festival, and I felt like he wanted to share something with me. It was almost like a mea culpa. And he told me that he honestly believed that he was a pacifist and that, for an American politician, that’s not the kind of thing that you want to roll out in front of the American public. At that time, George was 83, 84, 85 years old. And I said to him, "George, what—what the hell’s the difference right now? You’re not running for anything. This would be a remarkable—a remarkable statement for you to make, and to kind of, you know, just go that extra few yards." But he wanted to hold on, I think, to the valor and the glory of what he considered to be the good war. And—but I know, stealing the title from David Swanson’s book, War Is a Lie, that George completely believed that war is a lie.

AMYGOODMAN:One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern. Why do you say "forgotten"? And what do you think are the lessons that Democratic candidates of the future took from George McGovern, since he won only one state plus the District of Columbia? He won Massachusetts.

STEPHENVITTORIA: Yeah. It truly felt to me like it was the forgotten summer of George McGovern. I was a teenager at the time, and I worked very hard on the campaign—couldn’t vote for him, but I worked for him. And, you know, there were—I believe the 1960s, the social revolutions of the 1960s, absolutely came to an end in 1972. The people that cut their teeth on the antiwar movement and civil rights movement, the women’s movement, they came together on George McGovern’s campaign.

And I’ll give you two examples, kind of a tale of two cities, people that came out of that—those campaigns, and you can see why it was the forgotten summer. On the negative side, you had Bill and Hillary Clinton, who both worked tirelessly for George McGovern. And here we are all these years later, and it seems like Bill and Hillary Clinton are kind of hit men for the Mob. It doesn’t seem like they learned anything from the George McGovern campaign or from the 1960s. Michael Moore, on the other hand, worked tirelessly for George McGovern, and we see what he did with that campaign and what he learned in that campaign, and he took the ideas of fighting war, fighting hatred, fighting poverty, and he’s put it to work in his career, he’s put it to work in his films. So, there were an awful lot of people who kind of sold out from the George McGovern campaign, and it truly was a forgotten summer. A few people held on to it.

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Mon, 22 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0400George McGovern, 1922-2012: Antiwar Candidate Who Challenged Vietnam and Inspired a Generationhttp://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/19/as_sen_george_mcgovern_nears_death
tag:democracynow.org,2012-10-19:en/story/027ec0 AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re on the road in Sacramento, California, as we continue our 100-city Silenced Majority Election 2012 tour . Today, a Democracy Now! special. We look at the life and legacy of the presidential candidate, the antiwar leader, Senator George McGovern.
A family spokesperson says the 90-year-old McGovern is no longer responsive and, quote, &quot;at the end stages of his life.&quot; He has been in hospice care since Monday, suffering from a combination of age-related medical conditions that have worsened in recent months.
Senator McGovern is best known for running against Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election on a platform of withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam, reducing defense spending, and providing amnesty to those who evaded the draft. As a decorated World War II pilot who flew B-24 bombers over Nazi Germany, McGovern did not fit the stereotype of antiwar leaders in the &#8217;60s and &#8217;70s. Although he ultimately lost his election bid by a landslide, he shattered the consensus in Capitol Hill around the Vietnam War as the first senator to speak out against the war.
Senator McGovern is also known for transforming how the Democratic Party chooses its presidential nominee. Four years prior to his &#8217;72 run for the White House, he chaired the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection. In 1982, the Democratic National Committee approved a new series of reforms, including the establishment of superdelegates to give the party more direct control over the selection of presidential candidates. Speaking on Democracy Now! in 2008 , Senator McGovern described the impact of the reforms.
GEORGE McGOVERN: The &#39;72 convention, which was the first one to come under the new McGovern reforms, was pretty evenly balanced between men and women. You looked out over that convention floor. We also said that there should be some consideration given to age groups. Some of the biggest delegations to the &#8217;68 convention didn&#39;t have a single person 30 years of age or under, even though the transcendent issue of that time was the war in Vietnam, where everybody was under 30. So we corrected some serious imbalances in the way the delegations were put together.
AMY GOODMAN : In 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Senator McGovern the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America&#8217;s highest civilian honor.
Senator McGovern is the author of a number of books, including an autobiography and a story of his daughter&#8217;s struggle with alcoholism. He also wrote What It Means to Be a Democrat .
Well, today we turn to a 2005 documentary about George McGovern that I narrated called One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern . It&#8217;s written, directed and produced by Stephen Vittoria and traces Senator McGovern&#8217;s 1972 grassroots campaign for the presidency. It features interviews with McGovern supporters and activists, like Gore Vidal, Gloria Steinem, actor Warren Beatty, Howard Zinn. This clip begins with a 1972 campaign film for presidential candidate McGovern.
SADIE DEVELLO : I can&#8217;t afford to buy groceries, and I can&#8217;t afford to get sick. And believe me, I can&#8217;t afford to die.
SEN . GEORGE McGOVERN: There are 25 million Americans over 65. They are mothers and wives. They are people who once belonged to somebody. And now they belong to nobody, not even the nation their husbands and sons died for.
WARREN BEATTY : It&#8217;s hard to find a person who has run for something that has engendered as much affection as George McGovern has engendered.
GLORIA STEINEM : I was waiting at the airport for somebody that Galbraith had been described to me as the senator from South Dakota, and he would give me a ride. So, I was looking around for somebody who looked like a senator and didn&#8217;t—didn&#8217;t really see anybody. There was this kind of uncertain man with an old, bulging briefcase and a too big suit.
GORE VIDAL : As you know, all politicians are [blank]. I suppose George has his aspects, too, not to mention myself.
GLORIA STEINEM : And I was surprised because, I don&#8217;t know, I was a young journalist. I hadn&#8217;t met that many senators. I expected him to—to look like a senator. But after we got in the car together and I began to listen to him, I discovered he not only sounded like a senator, he sounded like a great mind of history.
CHIP BERLET : I remember standing on the floor of the convention as McGovern was being nominated and looking over at the Colorado delegation. And there&#8217;s, you know, young people and black people and all kinds of different folks in that delegation. It really was diverse. And everyone was crying.
FRANK MANKIEWICZ : Well, of course, all of this talk about him as a softy, you know, and that he didn&#8217;t have the spine to be president was just preposterous. I mean, the man is an authentic American hero.
JIM ABOUREZK : He wanted to be there to advance civilization. If McGovern had won in &#8217;72, he would have led this nation on a compassionate future.
JIM BOUTON : I liked George McGovern because he wasn&#8217;t a firebrand, even though they tried to take everything he said and turned it into a table-pounding pronouncement. But he wasn&#8217;t a firebrand. He was—he was calm. He was—he was thoughtful. He was very articulate. How often have we had those things in our entire history?
HARVEY KORNBERG : I mean, after Watergate, I used to drive around—I drove around with a sticker. I insisted and said, &quot;Don&#8217;t blame me. I voted for McGovern.&quot; You know, that&#8217;s the way—that&#8217;s the way I saw it.
J.C. SVEC : Can you imagine if McGovern had become president? Can you imagine a world without Watergate, without yellow ribbons, without Madison Avenue-induced patriotism? Can you imagine a world that wasn&#8217;t hungry?
DICK GREGORY : If you took darkness and lit one match, from miles away you can see that little match. And that&#8217;s what—that&#8217;s what he was able to do, you know. But he—his light was too bright. That&#8217;s what it was. His light was too bright, because he didn&#8217;t understand compromise.
REV . MALCOLM BOYD : McGovern is in this school, is in this tradition. What he did is as important now as it was then, because American history isn&#8217;t something in the past. It&#8217;s continuing. So we are a part of it. Tape is rolling on American history.
PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY : There is great difficulty, however, in fighting a guerrilla war. You need 10 to one, or 11 to one, especially in terrain as difficult a South Vietnam. We don&#8217;t see the end of the tunnel, but I must say, I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s darker than it was a year ago, in some ways lighter.
SEN . ROBERT F. KENNEDY : There is a light at the end of the tunnel. We can soon bring our troops home. Victory is near.
PRESIDENT LYNDON B. JOHNSON : We still seek no wider war.
SEN . ROBERT F. KENNEDY : Once in 1962, I participated in such a prediction myself. But for 20 years, we have been wrong.
REV . MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: I speak out against this war because I am disappointed with America. There can be no great disappointment where there is no great love.
AMY GOODMAN : With the Vietnam War drilling a hole through Lyndon Johnson&#8217;s presidency, as well as everyday American life, New York political alchemist Allard Lowenstein roamed the halls of Capitol Hill looking to dump Johnson. He knew that good, old Uncle Baines couldn&#8217;t be beat, but someone had to raise the moral flag against the war. And his first stop was Bobby Kennedy&#8217;s office. The first-term New York senator understood the rightness of the cause but knew that throwing his hat in the ring would surely wreck the Democratic Party and possibly his own career. Kennedy suggested South Dakota Senator George McGovern, probably the most ardent critic of the war. In recommending his friend, Bobby said, &quot;George is the most decent man in the Senate. As a matter of fact, he&#8217;s probably the only one.&quot;
GEORGE McGOVERN: Nobody dreamed that Johnson would resign and decide not to run again. I thought, since I was up for re-election to the Senate, it would be better to get a senator who didn&#8217;t have to forfeit his seat in the Senate, so I suggested Gene McCarthy.
THOMAS J. KNOCK : But the one thing that he was really concerned about was that the establishment was going to pursue this war. Nobody was going to be there to make a case against the war at the Democratic convention.
GEORGE McGOVERN: So, finally I decided I would do it. I was right in the middle of a campaign for re-election to the Senate, and that I was simply trying to hold the Kennedy delegates and the Kennedy standard at the convention. I&#8217;ve always been glad I did that.
SEN . GEORGE McGOVERN: I share with countless other Americans a profound sense that the untimely deaths of John and Robert Kennedy, and as well of Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King, have left a painful void of unfulfilled dreams that all of us must try to restore. It is for these purposes that I declare myself a candidate for the presidential nomination.
GLORIA STEINEM : I think that some of us probably enraged Eugene McCarthy with buttons that said &quot;McGovern is the real Eugene McCarthy,&quot; because he had had the record on the war that McCarthy hadn&#8217;t.
PROTESTERS : The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!
JERRY RUBIN : The Democratic Party has blood on its hands, and because there&#8217;s a struggle going on in the world today between young people and between those old menopausal men who run this country, and it&#8217;s a struggle about what the future of this country is about.
SEN . HUBERT HUMPHREY : I think that withdrawal would be totally unrealistic and would be a catastrophe.
AMY GOODMAN : Chicago, 1968, definitely not the summer of love, a moment when the better angels of our nature was so unmistakably missing. It was also when the 1972 candidacy of George McGovern began to mount.
GORE VIDAL : I first met him in 1968, the Chicago convention, where the police rioted and we saw American democracy in action. American democracy was then called Mayor Daley.
FRANK MANKIEWICZ : The issue was Vietnam. And if you were against the war, you got your head cracked. It was that simple.
WARREN BEATTY : I remember being outside of the Hilton Hotel in Chicago the night that Hubert Humphrey had won the nomination, and being gassed.
GLORIA STEINEM : We were seeing a police riot, as Jimmy Breslin later aptly named it. You know, the police were completely out of control.
GEORGE McGOVERN: Well, it was a sickening scene. You saw two groups of young people facing each other: the youngsters who were protesting the war and then these young policemen. I, frankly, had a tinge of sympathy for both sides, because it was the war that tore that city apart.
RON KOVIC : I also remember at the Bronx VA, I remember being in one of the rooms, one of the paraplegics. And the TV was on. And I remember the chant, &quot;The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!&quot;
JIM ABOUREZK : Mayor Daley played it perfectly to get everybody angry at McGovern and the peace campaign.
FRANK MANKIEWICZ : His authority was being challenged, in his mind, by people who really had no right to challenge it. They had no experience in politics.
HARVEY KORNBERG : And it was ugly, and ugly as hell, and that Daley just had incredible control over his police. I mean, these were scenes right out of Nazi Germany in the early &#8217;30s after Hitler took power, cracking down on any dissent.
RON KOVIC : And I remember saying to myself, almost in a whisper, &quot;That&#8217;s wrong. That&#8217;s—what they&#8217;re doing, that&#8217;s wrong.&quot;
CHIP BERLET : And I think that was the first time I really began to get scared about the possibility of the government becoming my enemy.
RON KOVIC : All the veterans in the room were cheering on the beating of the protesters, but I didn&#8217;t cheer that night. I remember feeling an empathy for those protesters who were being beaten. So things were changing inside of me.
DICK GREGORY : I just laid on the floor, and I laughed so hard said. My wife said, &quot;What&#8217;s wrong?&quot; I said, &quot;The world has changed today. The white folks around the world have never seen their white children get beat up.&quot; I mean, white folks had always looked at the cops: this is the guy that comes get my cat out the tree in the suburbs, and he&#8217;s always there to keep them away from me. Remember one thing: going into that &#8217;68 convention, the chant was &quot;support your local police.&quot; Coming out of that &#8217;68 convention, something happened.
THOMAS J. KNOCK : Abe Ribicoff probably enjoys the distinction of uttering the most famous line of the entire convention.
SEN . ABRAHAM RIBICOFF : With George McGovern as president of the United States, we wouldn&#8217;t have to have Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago. With George McGovern, we wouldn&#8217;t have a National Guard.
THOMAS J. KNOCK : Richard Daley saw this as a personal attack. And in a way, it was a personal attack: it was his police force. And, of course, he mouthed the famous reply to Abe Ribicoff. There&#8217;s a lot of debate over what he actually said. And here you might want to run that tape and let people—
STEPHEN VITTORIA : What do you think he said?
THOMAS J. KNOCK : Well, I can&#8217;t remember exactly what it was.
SEN . ABRAHAM RIBICOFF : How hard it is.
THOMAS J. KNOCK : I don&#8217;t want to say. I&#8217;m sorry, I just—
STEPHEN VITTORIA : OK. That&#8217;s all right.
THOMAS J. KNOCK : I can&#8217;t—I can&#8217;t use those words.
STEPHEN VITTORIA : OK, I only want you to do—
THOMAS J. KNOCK : He calls him a [blank] son of a—no, he&#8217;s anti-Semitic in this. He says something like, &quot;You&quot; —he uses the word &quot;Jew&quot; in this also. You can get—there are better people than me to do that, really, I think.
STEPHEN VITTORIA : OK.
UNIDENTIFIED : Saved by the plane.
THOMAS J. KNOCK : Yeah. God bless you, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SEN . ABRAHAM RIBICOFF : How hard it is to accept the truth.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;ll continue with Steve Vittoria&#8217;s documentary One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern in a moment.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : &quot;Universal Soldier&quot; by Donovan, here on Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I&#8217;m Amy Goodman, as we continue with the award-winning documentary, One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern , directed by Stephen Vittoria. A family spokesperson has confirmed that the 90-year-old former presidential candidate and antiwar leader George McGovern is at the end stages of his life in hospice care. He&#8217;s now unresponsive. We return to the documentary.
AMY GOODMAN : A sign reads: &quot;Kill one person, call it murder. Kill a million, call it foreign policy.&quot;
FRANK MANKIEWICZ : There are a lot of Americans who were not offended by the idea that we&#8217;re at war and killing a lot of natives. There were still a lot of people who thought, &quot;Yeah, a pretty good thing. Let&#8217;s go get those gooks.&quot;
PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON : There has been and continues to be opposition to the war in Vietnam on the campuses and also in the nation. As far as this kind of activity is concerned, we expect it. However, under no circumstances will I be affected whatever by it.
DICK GREGORY : The president of the United States said nothing you young kids would do would have any effect on him. Well, I suggest to the president of the United States, if he want to know how much effect you youngsters can have on the president, he should make one long-distance phone call to the LBJ ranch and ask that boy how much effect you can have.
AMY GOODMAN : McGovern made a number of trips to Vietnam to see the battlefields firsthand, the jungles that were claiming so many lives. His first trip was in 1965.
GEORGE McGOVERN: I went to a hospital of American soldiers in Saigon. The very first person I talked to was a captain. And the nurse who was taking me around said the captain got the Silver Star and the Purple Heart. I said, &quot;Well, congratulations, Captain.&quot; And as I did so, his lips started to quiver. And I looked down on the bed, and his feet were gone. He had stepped on a mine and blown off his feet about six inches above the ankles. And I visited with him for a while, and I said, &quot;Well, congratulations again, Captain, on the Purple Heart this morning.&quot; He said, &quot;That&#8217;s easy to get in this damn place.&quot;
I went into a civilian hospital where the Vietnamese were being cared for. They were the victims of shrapnel from American gunfire. One woman had a baby that she was holding. The baby&#8217;s head was completely wrapped in bandages except for the eyes. And I asked her if she would mind if I took a picture of her and that baby. She picked up an old rag to wipe some of the blood off the bandages on the baby&#8217;s face and then tried to smile wanly. And I took that picture, which I still have.
Douglas MacArthur told the Senate Armed Services Committee after the bitter experience in Korea, any American commander-in-chief who ever again commits young Americans to warfare on the Asian mainland ought to have his head examined.
AMY GOODMAN : By mid-1970, with Nixon in office a year and a half, his secret plan to end the war obviously nothing more than campaign rhetoric, he and Kissinger roll out another fairy tale: Vietnamization.
THOMAS J. KNOCK : The idea was to reduce the number of American troops in Vietnam at the same time you increased the size of the army of South Vietnam. The catch there, however, was that in order to even Vietnamize the Vietnam War that way, you still had to sustain the bombing. And under Richard Nixon, it must be said that we dropped yet another equivalent of World War II on Vietnam, and, of course, Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia in the spring of 1970.
GEORGE McGOVERN: I thought it was just terrible the way the Nixon people handled Vietnam. We could have gotten out and saved 25,000 young American lives, probably at least a million Vietnamese lives. We killed two million people, but most of those people were the casualties of American bombers, tanks, flamethrowers, automatic weapons, chemical warfare, defoliation of the trees and all that sort of thing. So, Nixon was responsible for a great part of that by not ending that war when he came to power. And there&#8217;s no excuse for that war going on one month afterwards. The country was ready for some kind of a settlement at that point. I think that&#8217;s a tragedy.
SEN . GEORGE McGOVERN: Never again will we send the precious young blood of this country to die trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad.
J.C. SVEC : I grew up with the Bayonne Times . And I grew up with this little graphic in the corner of that front page, and it was a little silhouette of a soldier and a bayonet on a rifle. And that stood for how many killed in action in Vietnam. And if that didn&#8217;t scare the hell out of you as you were coming up to draft age, I don&#8217;t know what did. The fact that they could simplify human death to a little graphic on the front page of a newspaper, first scared you, and then made you sick.
SGT . MICHAEL BERNHARDT : CO&#8217;s order was to destroy the village and its inhabitants.
REPORTER : Why? Did you think the people in the village were Viet Cong?
SGT . MICHAEL BERNHARDT : Some of the people in the village—you say &quot;people in the village.&quot; Some of the people in the village weren&#8217;t old enough to walk yet.
REV . MALCOLM BOYD : If we&#8217;re going to take the canvas of America, then there are stains on the canvas. And here is someone prophetically and courageously first admitting where the stains are rather than lying about them. We have got to confess sins, but then, it is never enough to confess sins—that&#8217;s cheap grace. You have to change the direction. Repentance means changing direction.
J.C. SVEC : George McGovern wanted out. He wanted—he wanted my friends and my relatives to come home, and not in a body bag.
AMY GOODMAN : Literally hours before Nixon and Kissinger invade Cambodia, McGovern and Republican Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon introduce an amendment to the military procurement authorization bill that, if passed, would prohibit the use of funds to finance American military operations in Southeast Asia after 31 December, 1970, the end of the year. The amendment was the first serious attempt by either the House or the Senate to reclaim from the executive branch the war-making and war-funding powers clearly granted to them by the United States Constitution.
THOMAS J. KNOCK : The invasion of Cambodia just set the American political landscape on fire. It revitalized the antiwar movement, which had flagged somewhat in the previous months, and it set in motion demonstrations all across the United States on college campuses, and of course culminated in the tragic shootings at Kent State University on May 4th, 1970.
UNIDENTIFIED : &quot;The four who died here, the nine who were wounded here, the many who faced a Portage grand jury, they did more for their country than all the Nixons and the Agnews and the Reagans could possibly do.&quot; William Kunstler.
HARVEY KORNBERG : Remember, this was a—this was pure tragedy in that sense. The National Guardsmen who were sent to maintain order in Kent State were roughly the same age. In fact, a number of them attended Kent State themselves. I mean, one could have forecast that when Nixon extended the war into Cambodia, this would happen.
HOWARD ZINN : To me, as a historian, what this tells me is that this is part of an old story. It&#8217;s really not a surprise that the United States government would turn on its own people. The history of the labor movement is a history of government forces—policemen, sheriff, Army—clubbing, killing, disabling a people who are out on strike.
DICK GREGORY : That same group had went to Orangeburg, South Carolina, to the University of South Carolina and killed students. They went to Jackson State in Mississippi and killed students. And nobody gave a damn—until they went and did the same thing. And we try to tell white folks, what they do to me today, they do to y&#8217;all next week. They don&#8217;t understand that.
FRANK MANKIEWICZ : I think Hunter Thompson said, they looked at the people, they didn&#8217;t see them as protesters, they saw them as criminals. Well, you deal with criminals in a strong-armed way, and if you can work up a good reason to do so, you shoot them. It was awful.
DICK GREGORY : When Kent State hit, we were glad, because now y&#8217;all had messed up. Well, that&#8217;s the way we looked at it. The sadness was there, but the outrage that&#8217;s going to come out of it is incredible.
CHIP BERLET : It was no longer a political cause to shut down the war, but we felt it was necessary to shut down the whole government, shut down the country, until people started to deal with what was happening and how America was being ripped apart.
GEORGE McGOVERN: I sat up more than once consoling the father of one of the girls who was killed. She wasn&#8217;t in the protest; she was just walking to her next class, and she took a fatal shot. And her father, who was a Pittsburgh steel worker, came to my Senate office and just wept. &quot;What kind of a government is this?&quot;
The atmosphere was very tense in Washington. I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s an exaggeration to say that this country was never more divided over a war, with the exception of the Civil War. Our losses weren&#8217;t as heavy in Vietnam, but the numbers of people killed by our side was vastly greater. None of those people wanted a quarrel with the United States. And the great tragedy is that we stumbled into that war on the wrong side.
THOMAS J. KNOCK : In the summer of 1970, thousands of young people descended on Washington to lobby for the McGovern-Hatfield amendment. Capitol Hill was inundated by more mail than it ever received over any issue in American history. It was the thing people were talking about, the amendment to end the war. In September of 1970, the amendment finally came to a vote on the floor. Ninety-four senators were in their seats, and the gallery was filled, overflowing. Eleanor was there, the children were there. It was a highly dramatic moment.
GEORGE McGOVERN: Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood. Every senator here is partly responsible for the human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval and all across this land, young boys without legs or arms or genitals or faces or hopes. Don&#8217;t talk to them about bugging out or national honor or courage. It doesn&#8217;t take any courage at all for a congressman or a senator or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say, &quot;We&#8217;re staying in Vietnam,&quot; because it isn&#8217;t our blood that is being shed. So before we vote, let us ponder the admonition of Edmund Burke, that great parliamentarian of an earlier day: &quot;A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.&quot;
GORE VIDAL : And it&#8217;s a paraphrase of John Bright, who was the greatest radical orator in all England. He said, &quot;I hear in this chamber, as we speak, the wings of the angel of death.&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;ll continue with Steve Vittoria&#8217;s documentary, One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern , in a moment, as George McGovern is in hospice care nearing the end of his life. Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN : &quot;I Ain&#8217;t Marching Anymore,&quot; Phil Ochs, here on Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I&#8217;m Amy Goodman.
A family spokesperson says Senator George McGovern is now in the end stages of his life, in hospice care, unresponsive since Wednesday. He is surrounded by family. We continue now with the award-winning documentary, One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern . It was written, directed and produced by Stephen Vittoria.
VOICEOVER : &quot;No other metaphor but that of a guerrilla army on the move can describe the upheaval that was to shake and change the entire Democratic Party in the next ten weeks, for the march of George McGovern in those ten weeks would go down as a classic in American political history. ... a masterpiece of partisan warfare, its troops living off the land, tapping [into] frustration everywhere; ... all of them recruiting, preaching, persuading, stirring to action hearts hitherto unstirred by politics.&quot; Theodore White, The Making of the President 1972 .
J.C. SVEC : McGovern gave us a reason to stand up and say, &quot;Wait a minute. If it&#8217;s worth believing in, if it&#8217;s worth doing, I&#8217;m going to do it, no matter what the cost.&quot; And McGovern was doing that.
JIM BOUTON : A lot of political amateurs, a lot of people getting into politics for the first time, people feeling like they needed to—to step in and have a say and start to get involved in the actual gears of how—how politics worked.
GARY HART : We ran a different kind of campaign. We had no money, therefore couldn&#8217;t buy media. So we had to rely on grassroots volunteers. We knew that from the start, right from the start. And therefore, we made appeals on the campuses and to young people and to volunteers.
JIM BOUTON : And so, you had housewives and, you know, ex-baseball players and, you know, regular folks who had always watched these things on television. So if you were a professional politician, you were almost, by definition, disqualified.
AMY GOODMAN : New Hampshire, the birthplace of the McGovern army, &quot;Live Free or Die.&quot; And the army went to work with a passion rarely seen. And then the candidates started pounding away, town after town, living room after living room. McGovern talked jobs. He talked unfair taxation, wasteful military spending, the big business havens of the Nixon plan. And, of course, he talked about ending the bloodshed in Vietnam—immediately.
SEN . GEORGE McGOVERN: Even if we stayed there and bomb for the next five years and Americans continue to die and we spend another $100 billion, five years from now we&#8217;re going to be right where we are now. So let&#8217;s recognize that we made a mistake and these young men have given their lives, and let&#8217;s quit killing other young men. Let&#8217;s bring this war to an end.
AMY GOODMAN : The so-called experts of conventional wisdom said that the young street fighters in the McGovern army couldn&#8217;t organize California. In fact, they said, nobody could. But as Gary Hart recalls, &quot;We marched into Lotusland with the prairie statesman at the front of a ragtag army of guerrilla warriors.&quot;
GARY HART : In a way, this was as good as it was going to get, because the tide was with us. It was a triumph of the best of American politics, in a way, that a dark horse, unknown, could begin to lead one of the two major parties and possibly challenge the power structure.
AMY GOODMAN : Borrowed from the poetry from Jack Kerouac and traveling with the ghost of Robert Kennedy, McGovern embarks on a classic whistle-stop train trek through the San Joaquin Valley, the same trek Kennedy made in &#8217;68.
VOICEOVER : &quot;McGovern wasn&#8217;t campaigning against anyone. He was campaigning for something, for America&#8217;s heart and soul. He was seeking to lead America home again. The only opponent was Richard Nixon. And who could gainsay the rightness of that cause? This was the people&#8217;s train in the people&#8217;s valley and the people&#8217;s state. And soon, it would be the people&#8217;s country.&quot; Gary Hart, Right from the Start .
DICK GREGORY : You know, if you&#8217;ve been in the dark for so long, light hurts your eyes. Huh? That&#8217;s normal. I mean, do you remember Dracula? Didn&#8217;t he have to get back before the sun came out? OK, and so, people are the same way. People get comfortable with filth.
PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON : I have never obstructed justice. And I think, too, that I can also say that in my years of public life, that I welcome this kind of examination, because people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I&#8217;m not a crook.
REPORTER : The Democrats put on a bizarre fashion show. If there had been credits for the Democratic convention, they would have read: &quot;Leading man, George McGovern; stage manager, Larry O&#8217;Brien; fashions by Levi Strauss.&quot; The new young Democrats wore their T-shirts and blue jeans and Afros and dashikis as badges.
AMY GOODMAN : The challenge to McGovern&#8217;s winner-take-all California victory was a knockdown, drag-out fight, a fight the McGovern brain trust would eventually win, but a fight that left a great deal of damage in its wake. But for the moment, a bright and shining moment, the 1972 Democratic convention was George McGovern&#8217;s, a convention that looked like no other in American history, a convention that represented the joy of participatory democracy in the hands of average people, a victory over smoke-filled rooms populated by professional greed. For once in American politics, sunshine and light beat shadows and fog.
SEN . GEORGE McGOVERN: But the president of United States can make a difference. He can set the moral and political tone of this country. He can speak out against injustice. He can use the power and the influence of that office to lead us in a more constructive and humane direction.
VOTE TALLY : Four votes for Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm; for Governor George Wallace, six votes; 86 and a half for Jackson; 119 votes for the next president, Senator George McGovern!
CONVENTION SPEAKER : Senator George McGovern, having received a majority vote of this convention&#8217;s certified delegates, is hereby declared the 1972 Democratic nominee for president of the United States.
SEN . GEORGE McGOVERN: From secrecy and deception in high places, come home, America.
UNIDENTIFIED : This was the most open political convention in American political history.
GLORIA STEINEM : I&#8217;ve been to a lot of Democratic conventions in my time, and I&#8217;ve witnessed Republican ones from afar. It was the only time I&#8217;ve ever seen a convention that actually looked something like the country.
HARVEY KORNBERG : And it seemed to indicate a new—a new dawn, that now politics was not only the preserve of older, white men.
JIM BOUTON : Probably the last unscripted convention in American political history. I don&#8217;t think anybody wanted to take a chance again at something so organic and natural and spontaneous.
HARVEY KORNBERG : Many of the opponents called it the convention of hippies, yippies, dippies and Jane Fonda, you see?
JIM BOUTON : We really felt that some decisions were actually going to be made down there, not in advance.
HARVEY KORNBERG : This joining together of so many causes, if you will, and over the Democratic Party&#8217;s platform, was incredible. We had planks in that platform never seen before—gay rights, for example, broad-based, real civil rights enforcement, abortion, a strong platform for women&#8217;s rights. These things were unheard of prior to 1972.
CHIP BERLET : This was democracy in action. This was, I think, for me, the peak of the campaign, was—was seeing that kind of emotion pouring out of people on the floor, because they felt that McGovern was going to treat them fairly and do his best, which is not something we have come to expect from politicians.
GEORGE McGOVERN: Well, that&#8217;s the highlight of my life, I guess, winning the Democratic nomination of the oldest political party in American history. I remember the hands reaching up, the eager, excited faces, people laughing and talking, some weeping. There was a lot of emotion and passion in that campaign. And I&#8217;ll take those memories with me the rest of my life.
VOICEOVER : &quot;One had to be partial to a man whose delegates had the fair and average and open faces of an army of citizenry, as opposed to an army of the pols, and Aquarius knew then why the convention was obliged to be boring. There was insufficient evil in the room.&quot; Norman Mailer, St. George and the Godfather .
SEN . GEORGE McGOVERN: From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation, come home, America.
WARREN BEATTY : It was a very good speech, because George was there with the substance. He was there with the content.
SEN . GEORGE McGOVERN: From the entrenchment of special privilege and tax favoritism, from the waste of idle hands to the joy of useful labor.
THOMAS J. KNOCK : And probably the most beautifully delivered speech of McGovern&#8217;s entire career. He looked powerful. He sounded powerful.
SEN . GEORGE McGOVERN: From the prejudice based on race and sex, from the loneliness of the aging poor and the despair of the neglected sick, come home, America.
UNIDENTIFIED : His magnificent speech at the Democratic National Convention, I think, would have gone a long way in putting him in a viable position for the general election—except nobody saw it.
SEN . GEORGE McGOVERN: Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream. In 1968, many Americans thought they were voting to bring our sons home from Vietnam in peace. And since then, 20,000 of our sons have come home in coffins. I have no secret plan for peace. I have a public plan. And as one whose heart has ached for the past 10 years over the agony of Vietnam, I will halt the senseless bombing of Indochina on inaugural day.
GEORGE McGOVERN: I said, in my own handwritten lines, &quot;This country has made too many decisions in recent years behind closed doors, and it was those decisions that took us into Vietnam under the leadership of both parties. If I should become president of this country, I want those doors opened, and I want that war closed.&quot; That line gave me a lot of satisfaction.
SEN . GEORGE McGOVERN: Come home to the belief that we can seek a newer world.
RON KOVIC : &quot;Come home to the belief that we can seek a newer world.&quot; And we will, Robert Kennedy and George McGovern. We will seek that newer world, and we will never allow what happened to my generation to ever happen again. We will never forget the words on that late night in Miami of 1972. Those were precious words. Those were important words.
CHIP BERLET : There were a lot of people who were threatened by George McGovern. You had the rise of the neoconservative movement. These were the Democrats who supported the war and were Cold War liberals, and they wanted him stopped. And they were also horrified by the kind of social movements that students were involved in, and here was McGovern reaching out to dissident social movements.
JIM ABOUREZK : We were easily deceived by expert propagandists, which is what happened in &#39;72. Republicans are very good at getting people to vote against their own interest. Why would anybody with an income of $25,000 a year vote Republican? I don&#39;t know. I just have no idea. And George McGovern had that same problem.
GORE VIDAL : You know, I was brought up in the ruling class. They hate the people. The Bush family, if you gave them sodium pentothal and asked them, you know, &quot;What do you think about the American people?&quot; you&#8217;ll hear such profanity as you never heard before. The American people are an obstacle. Constitution stuck us with all these elections.
CHIP BERLET : I think we threatened the leadership of the Democratic Party in a very visceral way, and I think that they felt that stopping McGovern actually might be best for the Democratic Party.
J.C. SVEC : They were in fear of their political lives, and they were in fear of what might happen if McGovern won.
HARVEY KORNBERG : If he was defeated, maybe the reforms that he brought about would be defeated also.
GARY HART : The only way I made sense of this after the fact was that it was a struggle for power—not much to do with the issues, but a lot to do with who was going to run the Democratic Party.
HARVEY KORNBERG : Sometimes the losing faction says—you know, gives you the bird and says, &quot;Good, try and win without us.&quot;
CHIP BERLET : You had a whole range of movements that had really shaken the foundation of the United States. You had the civil rights movement. And from that came the antiwar movement. You had the women&#8217;s movement. You had the gay and lesbian rights movement. And all of these movements were making demands on America and asking for a new kind of rearrangement for power and privilege and a fairness and a seat at the table. But some people were completely horrified, especially by the lifestyle issues. And, I mean, it was bad enough that women wanted to be on top; they wanted to be on top of each other. Clearly, America was falling apart.
GARY HART : It&#8217;s a wonder anybody voted for him.
DICK GREGORY : If you look at the story of Jesus Christ, the one thing that keeps coming up was the word &quot;no.&quot; &quot;No.&quot; I mean, they said, &quot;Look, man. We don&#8217;t want to kill you. The big man came in. Man, the Jews are crazy. Man, we don&#8217;t want to kill you. But just say that you&#8217;re not the son of the Father.&quot; He says, &quot;No.&quot; He didn&#8217;t get into no high-fying or rapping. He just said, &quot;No.&quot; Said, &quot;Well, let me see this. Can we do&quot; — &quot;No.&quot; OK, &quot;no&quot; got him killed.
J.C. SVEC : We didn&#8217;t take the ball and run with it. McGovern had the ball. He didn&#8217;t drop it. I think he threw it up there, tried to pass it along. And the class of &#8217;72 fumbled.
DICK GREGORY : Compromise wasn&#8217;t even in his psyche. And because of that, as filthy as America is today, it&#8217;s a better place because of that light. See, once the light hits, you can&#8217;t turn it off.
GLORIA STEINEM : But his strength is that he appeals to the hope in us. I suppose that&#8217;s his strength and his weakness at the same time, you know, because hope is a very unruly emotion.
DICK GREGORY : One day, when the real people have to write history, Nixon and them thugs will get a little footnote.
GLORIA STEINEM : He posits a possibility and leads us toward it. Without an idea, without imagination of change, you can&#8217;t have change. It&#8217;s the imagination that comes first.
REV . MALCOLM BOYD : His contribution is enormous, in a prophetic conscience, also pragmatic political way. In other words, we need far more McGoverns. We haven&#8217;t had them.
J.C. SVEC : I can only imagine what this country might have evolved into if McGovern had won that election. We probably would not be sitting here on a hot August afternoon talking about the what-ifs.
AMY GOODMAN : Excerpts from the 2005 documentary I narrated, One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern , written, directed and produced by Stephen Vittoria. If you&#8217;d like a copy of today&#8217;s show, you can go to our website at democracynow.org.
A family spokesperson has confirmed that the 90-year-old Senator George McGovern, presidential candidate and antiwar leader, is no longer responsive and, quote, &quot;at the end stages of his life.&quot; He&#8217;s surrounded by family in hospice care in South Dakota.
And that does it for our broadcast. Our Election 2012 Silenced Majority tour continues tonight in Los Angeles at 8:00 p.m. at the Immanuel Presbyterian Church at 3300 Wilshire. Saturday, we continue in Santa Barbara at 9:00 a.m. at La Casa de La Raza, 601 East Montecito Street; then San Luis Obispo at 1:30 p.m. at Cal Poly&#8217;s Alex and Faye Spanos Theatre. Then, our Santa Cruz event is 8:00 p.m. Saturday night at the Crocker Theater. At [2:00 p.m.] on Sunday, we&#8217;ll be in Sebastopol at the Sebastopol Community Center, 390 Morris Street; then at 7:00 p.m. in Oakland at the First Congregational Church in Oakland. On Monday, we&#8217;re in Marin County at the Osher Marin Jewish Community Center, where our &quot;Expand the Debate&quot; series continues. AMYGOODMAN: We’re on the road in Sacramento, California, as we continue our 100-city Silenced Majority Election 2012 tour. Today, a Democracy Now! special. We look at the life and legacy of the presidential candidate, the antiwar leader, Senator George McGovern.

A family spokesperson says the 90-year-old McGovern is no longer responsive and, quote, "at the end stages of his life." He has been in hospice care since Monday, suffering from a combination of age-related medical conditions that have worsened in recent months.

Senator McGovern is best known for running against Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election on a platform of withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam, reducing defense spending, and providing amnesty to those who evaded the draft. As a decorated World War II pilot who flew B-24 bombers over Nazi Germany, McGovern did not fit the stereotype of antiwar leaders in the ’60s and ’70s. Although he ultimately lost his election bid by a landslide, he shattered the consensus in Capitol Hill around the Vietnam War as the first senator to speak out against the war.

Senator McGovern is also known for transforming how the Democratic Party chooses its presidential nominee. Four years prior to his ’72 run for the White House, he chaired the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection. In 1982, the Democratic National Committee approved a new series of reforms, including the establishment of superdelegates to give the party more direct control over the selection of presidential candidates. Speaking on Democracy Now! in 2008, Senator McGovern described the impact of the reforms.

GEORGE McGOVERN: The '72 convention, which was the first one to come under the new McGovern reforms, was pretty evenly balanced between men and women. You looked out over that convention floor. We also said that there should be some consideration given to age groups. Some of the biggest delegations to the ’68 convention didn't have a single person 30 years of age or under, even though the transcendent issue of that time was the war in Vietnam, where everybody was under 30. So we corrected some serious imbalances in the way the delegations were put together.

Senator McGovern is the author of a number of books, including an autobiography and a story of his daughter’s struggle with alcoholism. He also wrote What It Means to Be a Democrat.

Well, today we turn to a 2005 documentary about George McGovern that I narrated called One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern. It’s written, directed and produced by Stephen Vittoria and traces Senator McGovern’s 1972 grassroots campaign for the presidency. It features interviews with McGovern supporters and activists, like Gore Vidal, Gloria Steinem, actor Warren Beatty, Howard Zinn. This clip begins with a 1972 campaign film for presidential candidate McGovern.

SADIEDEVELLO: I can’t afford to buy groceries, and I can’t afford to get sick. And believe me, I can’t afford to die.

SEN. GEORGE McGOVERN: There are 25 million Americans over 65. They are mothers and wives. They are people who once belonged to somebody. And now they belong to nobody, not even the nation their husbands and sons died for.

WARRENBEATTY: It’s hard to find a person who has run for something that has engendered as much affection as George McGovern has engendered.

GLORIASTEINEM: I was waiting at the airport for somebody that Galbraith had been described to me as the senator from South Dakota, and he would give me a ride. So, I was looking around for somebody who looked like a senator and didn’t—didn’t really see anybody. There was this kind of uncertain man with an old, bulging briefcase and a too big suit.

GOREVIDAL: As you know, all politicians are [blank]. I suppose George has his aspects, too, not to mention myself.

GLORIASTEINEM: And I was surprised because, I don’t know, I was a young journalist. I hadn’t met that many senators. I expected him to—to look like a senator. But after we got in the car together and I began to listen to him, I discovered he not only sounded like a senator, he sounded like a great mind of history.

CHIPBERLET: I remember standing on the floor of the convention as McGovern was being nominated and looking over at the Colorado delegation. And there’s, you know, young people and black people and all kinds of different folks in that delegation. It really was diverse. And everyone was crying.

FRANKMANKIEWICZ: Well, of course, all of this talk about him as a softy, you know, and that he didn’t have the spine to be president was just preposterous. I mean, the man is an authentic American hero.

JIMABOUREZK: He wanted to be there to advance civilization. If McGovern had won in ’72, he would have led this nation on a compassionate future.

JIMBOUTON: I liked George McGovern because he wasn’t a firebrand, even though they tried to take everything he said and turned it into a table-pounding pronouncement. But he wasn’t a firebrand. He was—he was calm. He was—he was thoughtful. He was very articulate. How often have we had those things in our entire history?

HARVEYKORNBERG: I mean, after Watergate, I used to drive around—I drove around with a sticker. I insisted and said, "Don’t blame me. I voted for McGovern." You know, that’s the way—that’s the way I saw it.

J.C. SVEC: Can you imagine if McGovern had become president? Can you imagine a world without Watergate, without yellow ribbons, without Madison Avenue-induced patriotism? Can you imagine a world that wasn’t hungry?

DICKGREGORY: If you took darkness and lit one match, from miles away you can see that little match. And that’s what—that’s what he was able to do, you know. But he—his light was too bright. That’s what it was. His light was too bright, because he didn’t understand compromise.

REV. MALCOLMBOYD: McGovern is in this school, is in this tradition. What he did is as important now as it was then, because American history isn’t something in the past. It’s continuing. So we are a part of it. Tape is rolling on American history.

PRESIDENTJOHN F. KENNEDY: There is great difficulty, however, in fighting a guerrilla war. You need 10 to one, or 11 to one, especially in terrain as difficult a South Vietnam. We don’t see the end of the tunnel, but I must say, I don’t think it’s darker than it was a year ago, in some ways lighter.

SEN. ROBERT F. KENNEDY: There is a light at the end of the tunnel. We can soon bring our troops home. Victory is near.

PRESIDENTLYNDON B. JOHNSON: We still seek no wider war.

SEN. ROBERT F. KENNEDY: Once in 1962, I participated in such a prediction myself. But for 20 years, we have been wrong.

REV. MARTINLUTHERKING JR.: I speak out against this war because I am disappointed with America. There can be no great disappointment where there is no great love.

AMYGOODMAN: With the Vietnam War drilling a hole through Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, as well as everyday American life, New York political alchemist Allard Lowenstein roamed the halls of Capitol Hill looking to dump Johnson. He knew that good, old Uncle Baines couldn’t be beat, but someone had to raise the moral flag against the war. And his first stop was Bobby Kennedy’s office. The first-term New York senator understood the rightness of the cause but knew that throwing his hat in the ring would surely wreck the Democratic Party and possibly his own career. Kennedy suggested South Dakota Senator George McGovern, probably the most ardent critic of the war. In recommending his friend, Bobby said, "George is the most decent man in the Senate. As a matter of fact, he’s probably the only one."

GEORGE McGOVERN: Nobody dreamed that Johnson would resign and decide not to run again. I thought, since I was up for re-election to the Senate, it would be better to get a senator who didn’t have to forfeit his seat in the Senate, so I suggested Gene McCarthy.

THOMAS J. KNOCK: But the one thing that he was really concerned about was that the establishment was going to pursue this war. Nobody was going to be there to make a case against the war at the Democratic convention.

GEORGE McGOVERN: So, finally I decided I would do it. I was right in the middle of a campaign for re-election to the Senate, and that I was simply trying to hold the Kennedy delegates and the Kennedy standard at the convention. I’ve always been glad I did that.

SEN. GEORGE McGOVERN: I share with countless other Americans a profound sense that the untimely deaths of John and Robert Kennedy, and as well of Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King, have left a painful void of unfulfilled dreams that all of us must try to restore. It is for these purposes that I declare myself a candidate for the presidential nomination.

GLORIASTEINEM: I think that some of us probably enraged Eugene McCarthy with buttons that said "McGovern is the real Eugene McCarthy," because he had had the record on the war that McCarthy hadn’t.

PROTESTERS: The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!

JERRYRUBIN: The Democratic Party has blood on its hands, and because there’s a struggle going on in the world today between young people and between those old menopausal men who run this country, and it’s a struggle about what the future of this country is about.

SEN. HUBERTHUMPHREY: I think that withdrawal would be totally unrealistic and would be a catastrophe.

AMYGOODMAN: Chicago, 1968, definitely not the summer of love, a moment when the better angels of our nature was so unmistakably missing. It was also when the 1972 candidacy of George McGovern began to mount.

GOREVIDAL: I first met him in 1968, the Chicago convention, where the police rioted and we saw American democracy in action. American democracy was then called Mayor Daley.

FRANKMANKIEWICZ: The issue was Vietnam. And if you were against the war, you got your head cracked. It was that simple.

WARRENBEATTY: I remember being outside of the Hilton Hotel in Chicago the night that Hubert Humphrey had won the nomination, and being gassed.

GLORIASTEINEM: We were seeing a police riot, as Jimmy Breslin later aptly named it. You know, the police were completely out of control.

GEORGE McGOVERN: Well, it was a sickening scene. You saw two groups of young people facing each other: the youngsters who were protesting the war and then these young policemen. I, frankly, had a tinge of sympathy for both sides, because it was the war that tore that city apart.

RONKOVIC: I also remember at the Bronx VA, I remember being in one of the rooms, one of the paraplegics. And the TV was on. And I remember the chant, "The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!"

JIMABOUREZK: Mayor Daley played it perfectly to get everybody angry at McGovern and the peace campaign.

FRANKMANKIEWICZ: His authority was being challenged, in his mind, by people who really had no right to challenge it. They had no experience in politics.

HARVEYKORNBERG: And it was ugly, and ugly as hell, and that Daley just had incredible control over his police. I mean, these were scenes right out of Nazi Germany in the early ’30s after Hitler took power, cracking down on any dissent.

RONKOVIC: And I remember saying to myself, almost in a whisper, "That’s wrong. That’s—what they’re doing, that’s wrong."

CHIPBERLET: And I think that was the first time I really began to get scared about the possibility of the government becoming my enemy.

RONKOVIC: All the veterans in the room were cheering on the beating of the protesters, but I didn’t cheer that night. I remember feeling an empathy for those protesters who were being beaten. So things were changing inside of me.

DICKGREGORY: I just laid on the floor, and I laughed so hard said. My wife said, "What’s wrong?" I said, "The world has changed today. The white folks around the world have never seen their white children get beat up." I mean, white folks had always looked at the cops: this is the guy that comes get my cat out the tree in the suburbs, and he’s always there to keep them away from me. Remember one thing: going into that ’68 convention, the chant was "support your local police." Coming out of that ’68 convention, something happened.

THOMAS J. KNOCK: Abe Ribicoff probably enjoys the distinction of uttering the most famous line of the entire convention.

SEN. ABRAHAMRIBICOFF: With George McGovern as president of the United States, we wouldn’t have to have Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago. With George McGovern, we wouldn’t have a National Guard.

THOMAS J. KNOCK: Richard Daley saw this as a personal attack. And in a way, it was a personal attack: it was his police force. And, of course, he mouthed the famous reply to Abe Ribicoff. There’s a lot of debate over what he actually said. And here you might want to run that tape and let people—

STEPHENVITTORIA: What do you think he said?

THOMAS J. KNOCK: Well, I can’t remember exactly what it was.

SEN. ABRAHAMRIBICOFF: How hard it is.

THOMAS J. KNOCK: I don’t want to say. I’m sorry, I just—

STEPHENVITTORIA: OK. That’s all right.

THOMAS J. KNOCK: I can’t—I can’t use those words.

STEPHENVITTORIA: OK, I only want you to do—

THOMAS J. KNOCK: He calls him a [blank] son of a—no, he’s anti-Semitic in this. He says something like, "You" —he uses the word "Jew" in this also. You can get—there are better people than me to do that, really, I think.

STEPHENVITTORIA: OK.

UNIDENTIFIED: Saved by the plane.

THOMAS J. KNOCK: Yeah. God bless you, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SEN. ABRAHAMRIBICOFF: How hard it is to accept the truth.

AMYGOODMAN: We’ll continue with Steve Vittoria’s documentary One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern in a moment.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: "Universal Soldier" by Donovan, here on Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue with the award-winning documentary, One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern, directed by Stephen Vittoria. A family spokesperson has confirmed that the 90-year-old former presidential candidate and antiwar leader George McGovern is at the end stages of his life in hospice care. He’s now unresponsive. We return to the documentary.

FRANKMANKIEWICZ: There are a lot of Americans who were not offended by the idea that we’re at war and killing a lot of natives. There were still a lot of people who thought, "Yeah, a pretty good thing. Let’s go get those gooks."

PRESIDENTRICHARDNIXON: There has been and continues to be opposition to the war in Vietnam on the campuses and also in the nation. As far as this kind of activity is concerned, we expect it. However, under no circumstances will I be affected whatever by it.

DICKGREGORY: The president of the United States said nothing you young kids would do would have any effect on him. Well, I suggest to the president of the United States, if he want to know how much effect you youngsters can have on the president, he should make one long-distance phone call to the LBJ ranch and ask that boy how much effect you can have.

AMYGOODMAN: McGovern made a number of trips to Vietnam to see the battlefields firsthand, the jungles that were claiming so many lives. His first trip was in 1965.

GEORGE McGOVERN: I went to a hospital of American soldiers in Saigon. The very first person I talked to was a captain. And the nurse who was taking me around said the captain got the Silver Star and the Purple Heart. I said, "Well, congratulations, Captain." And as I did so, his lips started to quiver. And I looked down on the bed, and his feet were gone. He had stepped on a mine and blown off his feet about six inches above the ankles. And I visited with him for a while, and I said, "Well, congratulations again, Captain, on the Purple Heart this morning." He said, "That’s easy to get in this damn place."

I went into a civilian hospital where the Vietnamese were being cared for. They were the victims of shrapnel from American gunfire. One woman had a baby that she was holding. The baby’s head was completely wrapped in bandages except for the eyes. And I asked her if she would mind if I took a picture of her and that baby. She picked up an old rag to wipe some of the blood off the bandages on the baby’s face and then tried to smile wanly. And I took that picture, which I still have.

Douglas MacArthur told the Senate Armed Services Committee after the bitter experience in Korea, any American commander-in-chief who ever again commits young Americans to warfare on the Asian mainland ought to have his head examined.

AMYGOODMAN: By mid-1970, with Nixon in office a year and a half, his secret plan to end the war obviously nothing more than campaign rhetoric, he and Kissinger roll out another fairy tale: Vietnamization.

THOMAS J. KNOCK: The idea was to reduce the number of American troops in Vietnam at the same time you increased the size of the army of South Vietnam. The catch there, however, was that in order to even Vietnamize the Vietnam War that way, you still had to sustain the bombing. And under Richard Nixon, it must be said that we dropped yet another equivalent of World War II on Vietnam, and, of course, Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia in the spring of 1970.

GEORGE McGOVERN: I thought it was just terrible the way the Nixon people handled Vietnam. We could have gotten out and saved 25,000 young American lives, probably at least a million Vietnamese lives. We killed two million people, but most of those people were the casualties of American bombers, tanks, flamethrowers, automatic weapons, chemical warfare, defoliation of the trees and all that sort of thing. So, Nixon was responsible for a great part of that by not ending that war when he came to power. And there’s no excuse for that war going on one month afterwards. The country was ready for some kind of a settlement at that point. I think that’s a tragedy.

SEN. GEORGE McGOVERN: Never again will we send the precious young blood of this country to die trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad.

J.C. SVEC: I grew up with the Bayonne Times. And I grew up with this little graphic in the corner of that front page, and it was a little silhouette of a soldier and a bayonet on a rifle. And that stood for how many killed in action in Vietnam. And if that didn’t scare the hell out of you as you were coming up to draft age, I don’t know what did. The fact that they could simplify human death to a little graphic on the front page of a newspaper, first scared you, and then made you sick.

SGT. MICHAELBERNHARDT: CO’s order was to destroy the village and its inhabitants.

REPORTER: Why? Did you think the people in the village were Viet Cong?

SGT. MICHAELBERNHARDT: Some of the people in the village—you say "people in the village." Some of the people in the village weren’t old enough to walk yet.

REV. MALCOLMBOYD: If we’re going to take the canvas of America, then there are stains on the canvas. And here is someone prophetically and courageously first admitting where the stains are rather than lying about them. We have got to confess sins, but then, it is never enough to confess sins—that’s cheap grace. You have to change the direction. Repentance means changing direction.

J.C. SVEC: George McGovern wanted out. He wanted—he wanted my friends and my relatives to come home, and not in a body bag.

AMYGOODMAN: Literally hours before Nixon and Kissinger invade Cambodia, McGovern and Republican Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon introduce an amendment to the military procurement authorization bill that, if passed, would prohibit the use of funds to finance American military operations in Southeast Asia after 31 December, 1970, the end of the year. The amendment was the first serious attempt by either the House or the Senate to reclaim from the executive branch the war-making and war-funding powers clearly granted to them by the United States Constitution.

THOMAS J. KNOCK: The invasion of Cambodia just set the American political landscape on fire. It revitalized the antiwar movement, which had flagged somewhat in the previous months, and it set in motion demonstrations all across the United States on college campuses, and of course culminated in the tragic shootings at Kent State University on May 4th, 1970.

UNIDENTIFIED: "The four who died here, the nine who were wounded here, the many who faced a Portage grand jury, they did more for their country than all the Nixons and the Agnews and the Reagans could possibly do." William Kunstler.

HARVEYKORNBERG: Remember, this was a—this was pure tragedy in that sense. The National Guardsmen who were sent to maintain order in Kent State were roughly the same age. In fact, a number of them attended Kent State themselves. I mean, one could have forecast that when Nixon extended the war into Cambodia, this would happen.

HOWARDZINN: To me, as a historian, what this tells me is that this is part of an old story. It’s really not a surprise that the United States government would turn on its own people. The history of the labor movement is a history of government forces—policemen, sheriff, Army—clubbing, killing, disabling a people who are out on strike.

DICKGREGORY: That same group had went to Orangeburg, South Carolina, to the University of South Carolina and killed students. They went to Jackson State in Mississippi and killed students. And nobody gave a damn—until they went and did the same thing. And we try to tell white folks, what they do to me today, they do to y’all next week. They don’t understand that.

FRANKMANKIEWICZ: I think Hunter Thompson said, they looked at the people, they didn’t see them as protesters, they saw them as criminals. Well, you deal with criminals in a strong-armed way, and if you can work up a good reason to do so, you shoot them. It was awful.

DICKGREGORY: When Kent State hit, we were glad, because now y’all had messed up. Well, that’s the way we looked at it. The sadness was there, but the outrage that’s going to come out of it is incredible.

CHIPBERLET: It was no longer a political cause to shut down the war, but we felt it was necessary to shut down the whole government, shut down the country, until people started to deal with what was happening and how America was being ripped apart.

GEORGE McGOVERN: I sat up more than once consoling the father of one of the girls who was killed. She wasn’t in the protest; she was just walking to her next class, and she took a fatal shot. And her father, who was a Pittsburgh steel worker, came to my Senate office and just wept. "What kind of a government is this?"

The atmosphere was very tense in Washington. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that this country was never more divided over a war, with the exception of the Civil War. Our losses weren’t as heavy in Vietnam, but the numbers of people killed by our side was vastly greater. None of those people wanted a quarrel with the United States. And the great tragedy is that we stumbled into that war on the wrong side.

THOMAS J. KNOCK: In the summer of 1970, thousands of young people descended on Washington to lobby for the McGovern-Hatfield amendment. Capitol Hill was inundated by more mail than it ever received over any issue in American history. It was the thing people were talking about, the amendment to end the war. In September of 1970, the amendment finally came to a vote on the floor. Ninety-four senators were in their seats, and the gallery was filled, overflowing. Eleanor was there, the children were there. It was a highly dramatic moment.

GEORGE McGOVERN: Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood. Every senator here is partly responsible for the human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval and all across this land, young boys without legs or arms or genitals or faces or hopes. Don’t talk to them about bugging out or national honor or courage. It doesn’t take any courage at all for a congressman or a senator or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say, "We’re staying in Vietnam," because it isn’t our blood that is being shed. So before we vote, let us ponder the admonition of Edmund Burke, that great parliamentarian of an earlier day: "A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood."

GOREVIDAL: And it’s a paraphrase of John Bright, who was the greatest radical orator in all England. He said, "I hear in this chamber, as we speak, the wings of the angel of death."

AMYGOODMAN: We’ll continue with Steve Vittoria’s documentary, One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern, in a moment, as George McGovern is in hospice care nearing the end of his life. Stay with us.

A family spokesperson says Senator George McGovern is now in the end stages of his life, in hospice care, unresponsive since Wednesday. He is surrounded by family. We continue now with the award-winning documentary, One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern. It was written, directed and produced by Stephen Vittoria.

VOICEOVER: "No other metaphor but that of a guerrilla army on the move can describe the upheaval that was to shake and change the entire Democratic Party in the next ten weeks, for the march of George McGovern in those ten weeks would go down as a classic in American political history. ... a masterpiece of partisan warfare, its troops living off the land, tapping [into] frustration everywhere; ... all of them recruiting, preaching, persuading, stirring to action hearts hitherto unstirred by politics." Theodore White, The Making of the President 1972.

J.C. SVEC: McGovern gave us a reason to stand up and say, "Wait a minute. If it’s worth believing in, if it’s worth doing, I’m going to do it, no matter what the cost." And McGovern was doing that.

JIMBOUTON: A lot of political amateurs, a lot of people getting into politics for the first time, people feeling like they needed to—to step in and have a say and start to get involved in the actual gears of how—how politics worked.

GARYHART: We ran a different kind of campaign. We had no money, therefore couldn’t buy media. So we had to rely on grassroots volunteers. We knew that from the start, right from the start. And therefore, we made appeals on the campuses and to young people and to volunteers.

JIMBOUTON: And so, you had housewives and, you know, ex-baseball players and, you know, regular folks who had always watched these things on television. So if you were a professional politician, you were almost, by definition, disqualified.

AMYGOODMAN: New Hampshire, the birthplace of the McGovern army, "Live Free or Die." And the army went to work with a passion rarely seen. And then the candidates started pounding away, town after town, living room after living room. McGovern talked jobs. He talked unfair taxation, wasteful military spending, the big business havens of the Nixon plan. And, of course, he talked about ending the bloodshed in Vietnam—immediately.

SEN. GEORGE McGOVERN: Even if we stayed there and bomb for the next five years and Americans continue to die and we spend another $100 billion, five years from now we’re going to be right where we are now. So let’s recognize that we made a mistake and these young men have given their lives, and let’s quit killing other young men. Let’s bring this war to an end.

AMYGOODMAN: The so-called experts of conventional wisdom said that the young street fighters in the McGovern army couldn’t organize California. In fact, they said, nobody could. But as Gary Hart recalls, "We marched into Lotusland with the prairie statesman at the front of a ragtag army of guerrilla warriors."

GARYHART: In a way, this was as good as it was going to get, because the tide was with us. It was a triumph of the best of American politics, in a way, that a dark horse, unknown, could begin to lead one of the two major parties and possibly challenge the power structure.

AMYGOODMAN: Borrowed from the poetry from Jack Kerouac and traveling with the ghost of Robert Kennedy, McGovern embarks on a classic whistle-stop train trek through the San Joaquin Valley, the same trek Kennedy made in ’68.

VOICEOVER: "McGovern wasn’t campaigning against anyone. He was campaigning for something, for America’s heart and soul. He was seeking to lead America home again. The only opponent was Richard Nixon. And who could gainsay the rightness of that cause? This was the people’s train in the people’s valley and the people’s state. And soon, it would be the people’s country." Gary Hart, Right from the Start.

DICKGREGORY: You know, if you’ve been in the dark for so long, light hurts your eyes. Huh? That’s normal. I mean, do you remember Dracula? Didn’t he have to get back before the sun came out? OK, and so, people are the same way. People get comfortable with filth.

PRESIDENTRICHARDNIXON: I have never obstructed justice. And I think, too, that I can also say that in my years of public life, that I welcome this kind of examination, because people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.

REPORTER: The Democrats put on a bizarre fashion show. If there had been credits for the Democratic convention, they would have read: "Leading man, George McGovern; stage manager, Larry O’Brien; fashions by Levi Strauss." The new young Democrats wore their T-shirts and blue jeans and Afros and dashikis as badges.

AMYGOODMAN: The challenge to McGovern’s winner-take-all California victory was a knockdown, drag-out fight, a fight the McGovern brain trust would eventually win, but a fight that left a great deal of damage in its wake. But for the moment, a bright and shining moment, the 1972 Democratic convention was George McGovern’s, a convention that looked like no other in American history, a convention that represented the joy of participatory democracy in the hands of average people, a victory over smoke-filled rooms populated by professional greed. For once in American politics, sunshine and light beat shadows and fog.

SEN. GEORGE McGOVERN: But the president of United States can make a difference. He can set the moral and political tone of this country. He can speak out against injustice. He can use the power and the influence of that office to lead us in a more constructive and humane direction.

VOTETALLY: Four votes for Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm; for Governor George Wallace, six votes; 86 and a half for Jackson; 119 votes for the next president, Senator George McGovern!

CONVENTIONSPEAKER: Senator George McGovern, having received a majority vote of this convention’s certified delegates, is hereby declared the 1972 Democratic nominee for president of the United States.

SEN. GEORGE McGOVERN: From secrecy and deception in high places, come home, America.

UNIDENTIFIED: This was the most open political convention in American political history.

GLORIASTEINEM: I’ve been to a lot of Democratic conventions in my time, and I’ve witnessed Republican ones from afar. It was the only time I’ve ever seen a convention that actually looked something like the country.

HARVEYKORNBERG: And it seemed to indicate a new—a new dawn, that now politics was not only the preserve of older, white men.

JIMBOUTON: Probably the last unscripted convention in American political history. I don’t think anybody wanted to take a chance again at something so organic and natural and spontaneous.

HARVEYKORNBERG: Many of the opponents called it the convention of hippies, yippies, dippies and Jane Fonda, you see?

JIMBOUTON: We really felt that some decisions were actually going to be made down there, not in advance.

HARVEYKORNBERG: This joining together of so many causes, if you will, and over the Democratic Party’s platform, was incredible. We had planks in that platform never seen before—gay rights, for example, broad-based, real civil rights enforcement, abortion, a strong platform for women’s rights. These things were unheard of prior to 1972.

CHIPBERLET: This was democracy in action. This was, I think, for me, the peak of the campaign, was—was seeing that kind of emotion pouring out of people on the floor, because they felt that McGovern was going to treat them fairly and do his best, which is not something we have come to expect from politicians.

GEORGE McGOVERN: Well, that’s the highlight of my life, I guess, winning the Democratic nomination of the oldest political party in American history. I remember the hands reaching up, the eager, excited faces, people laughing and talking, some weeping. There was a lot of emotion and passion in that campaign. And I’ll take those memories with me the rest of my life.

VOICEOVER: "One had to be partial to a man whose delegates had the fair and average and open faces of an army of citizenry, as opposed to an army of the pols, and Aquarius knew then why the convention was obliged to be boring. There was insufficient evil in the room." Norman Mailer, St. George and the Godfather.

SEN. GEORGE McGOVERN: From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation, come home, America.

WARRENBEATTY: It was a very good speech, because George was there with the substance. He was there with the content.

SEN. GEORGE McGOVERN: From the entrenchment of special privilege and tax favoritism, from the waste of idle hands to the joy of useful labor.

THOMAS J. KNOCK: And probably the most beautifully delivered speech of McGovern’s entire career. He looked powerful. He sounded powerful.

SEN. GEORGE McGOVERN: From the prejudice based on race and sex, from the loneliness of the aging poor and the despair of the neglected sick, come home, America.

UNIDENTIFIED: His magnificent speech at the Democratic National Convention, I think, would have gone a long way in putting him in a viable position for the general election—except nobody saw it.

SEN. GEORGE McGOVERN: Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream. In 1968, many Americans thought they were voting to bring our sons home from Vietnam in peace. And since then, 20,000 of our sons have come home in coffins. I have no secret plan for peace. I have a public plan. And as one whose heart has ached for the past 10 years over the agony of Vietnam, I will halt the senseless bombing of Indochina on inaugural day.

GEORGE McGOVERN: I said, in my own handwritten lines, "This country has made too many decisions in recent years behind closed doors, and it was those decisions that took us into Vietnam under the leadership of both parties. If I should become president of this country, I want those doors opened, and I want that war closed." That line gave me a lot of satisfaction.

SEN. GEORGE McGOVERN: Come home to the belief that we can seek a newer world.

RONKOVIC: "Come home to the belief that we can seek a newer world." And we will, Robert Kennedy and George McGovern. We will seek that newer world, and we will never allow what happened to my generation to ever happen again. We will never forget the words on that late night in Miami of 1972. Those were precious words. Those were important words.

CHIPBERLET: There were a lot of people who were threatened by George McGovern. You had the rise of the neoconservative movement. These were the Democrats who supported the war and were Cold War liberals, and they wanted him stopped. And they were also horrified by the kind of social movements that students were involved in, and here was McGovern reaching out to dissident social movements.

JIMABOUREZK: We were easily deceived by expert propagandists, which is what happened in '72. Republicans are very good at getting people to vote against their own interest. Why would anybody with an income of $25,000 a year vote Republican? I don't know. I just have no idea. And George McGovern had that same problem.

GOREVIDAL: You know, I was brought up in the ruling class. They hate the people. The Bush family, if you gave them sodium pentothal and asked them, you know, "What do you think about the American people?" you’ll hear such profanity as you never heard before. The American people are an obstacle. Constitution stuck us with all these elections.

CHIPBERLET: I think we threatened the leadership of the Democratic Party in a very visceral way, and I think that they felt that stopping McGovern actually might be best for the Democratic Party.

J.C. SVEC: They were in fear of their political lives, and they were in fear of what might happen if McGovern won.

HARVEYKORNBERG: If he was defeated, maybe the reforms that he brought about would be defeated also.

GARYHART: The only way I made sense of this after the fact was that it was a struggle for power—not much to do with the issues, but a lot to do with who was going to run the Democratic Party.

HARVEYKORNBERG: Sometimes the losing faction says—you know, gives you the bird and says, "Good, try and win without us."

CHIPBERLET: You had a whole range of movements that had really shaken the foundation of the United States. You had the civil rights movement. And from that came the antiwar movement. You had the women’s movement. You had the gay and lesbian rights movement. And all of these movements were making demands on America and asking for a new kind of rearrangement for power and privilege and a fairness and a seat at the table. But some people were completely horrified, especially by the lifestyle issues. And, I mean, it was bad enough that women wanted to be on top; they wanted to be on top of each other. Clearly, America was falling apart.

GARYHART: It’s a wonder anybody voted for him.

DICKGREGORY: If you look at the story of Jesus Christ, the one thing that keeps coming up was the word "no." "No." I mean, they said, "Look, man. We don’t want to kill you. The big man came in. Man, the Jews are crazy. Man, we don’t want to kill you. But just say that you’re not the son of the Father." He says, "No." He didn’t get into no high-fying or rapping. He just said, "No." Said, "Well, let me see this. Can we do" — "No." OK, "no" got him killed.

J.C. SVEC: We didn’t take the ball and run with it. McGovern had the ball. He didn’t drop it. I think he threw it up there, tried to pass it along. And the class of ’72 fumbled.

DICKGREGORY: Compromise wasn’t even in his psyche. And because of that, as filthy as America is today, it’s a better place because of that light. See, once the light hits, you can’t turn it off.

GLORIASTEINEM: But his strength is that he appeals to the hope in us. I suppose that’s his strength and his weakness at the same time, you know, because hope is a very unruly emotion.

DICKGREGORY: One day, when the real people have to write history, Nixon and them thugs will get a little footnote.

GLORIASTEINEM: He posits a possibility and leads us toward it. Without an idea, without imagination of change, you can’t have change. It’s the imagination that comes first.

REV. MALCOLMBOYD: His contribution is enormous, in a prophetic conscience, also pragmatic political way. In other words, we need far more McGoverns. We haven’t had them.

J.C. SVEC: I can only imagine what this country might have evolved into if McGovern had won that election. We probably would not be sitting here on a hot August afternoon talking about the what-ifs.

AMYGOODMAN: Excerpts from the 2005 documentary I narrated, One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern, written, directed and produced by Stephen Vittoria. If you’d like a copy of today’s show, you can go to our website at democracynow.org.

A family spokesperson has confirmed that the 90-year-old Senator George McGovern, presidential candidate and antiwar leader, is no longer responsive and, quote, "at the end stages of his life." He’s surrounded by family in hospice care in South Dakota.

And that does it for our broadcast. Our Election 2012 Silenced Majority tour continues tonight in Los Angeles at 8:00 p.m. at the Immanuel Presbyterian Church at 3300 Wilshire. Saturday, we continue in Santa Barbara at 9:00 a.m. at La Casa de La Raza, 601 East Montecito Street; then San Luis Obispo at 1:30 p.m. at Cal Poly’s Alex and Faye Spanos Theatre. Then, our Santa Cruz event is 8:00 p.m. Saturday night at the Crocker Theater. At [2:00 p.m.] on Sunday, we’ll be in Sebastopol at the Sebastopol Community Center, 390 Morris Street; then at 7:00 p.m. in Oakland at the First Congregational Church in Oakland. On Monday, we’re in Marin County at the Osher Marin Jewish Community Center, where our "Expand the Debate" series continues.

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Fri, 19 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0400Glenn Greenwald: Presidential Debates Highlight "Faux Objectivity" of Mainstream Journalistshttp://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/16/glenn_greenwald_presidential_debates_highlight_faux
tag:democracynow.org,2012-10-16:en/story/8dfce0 AMY GOODMAN : Our guests are George Farah of Open Debates and Glenn Greenwald, who just wrote a very interesting piece about how—who gets to ask the questions. He is author of the book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful . But his piece in The Guardian is the one we want to talk about. Let&#8217;s turn to a question on—by moderator Martha Raddatz during the vice-presidential debate, when she asked the two candidates, Paul Ryan and Vice President Joe Biden, this question.
MARTHA RADDATZ : Let&#8217;s talk about Medicare and entitlements. Both Medicare and Social Security are going broke and taking a larger share of the budget in the process. Will benefits for Americans under these programs have to change for the programs to survive?
AMY GOODMAN : Glenn Greenwald, can you comment on the question?
GLENN GREENWALD : Well, the question is grounded on an assumption that is not just dubious but very vociferously debated among the nation&#8217;s leading economists, which is the idea that Social Security and Medicare are going broke. In the case of Social Security, it&#8217;s almost impossible to make that case that it actually is going broke. The Social Security actually makes money. To the extent that it is burdened with that, it&#8217;s because other government programs, whether it be military spending or all kinds of corporate cronyism, create all kinds of debt that Social Security essentially ends up funding.
And with regard to Medicare, the same thing. Lots of economists have pointed out that Medicare, with a few minor alterations, will be economically sound for many decades. This notion that it&#8217;s going broke is something that lots of right-wing millionaires have promulgated as a way of pressuring Americans into feeling like they have to give up their basic entitlements.
And so, to watch Martha Raddatz, posing as an objective journalist, embracing what is an extremely controversial premise in her question, and then watching both candidates accept that assumption rather than challenge them, sort of is the microcosm of how these debates work, which is, they pose as objective, neutral moderators designed to have this wide-ranging debate, when in reality it takes place within a very suffocating, small confine of ideas. And as George has been detailing, that&#8217;s what it&#8217;s designed to do.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : Well, I want to turn, Glenn, to another question that was raised during the debate, and this one on foreign policy. This is again moderator Martha Raddatz asking the candidates about Iran.
MARTHA RADDATZ : Let&#8217;s move to Iran. I&#8217;d actually like to move to Iran, because there&#8217;s really no bigger national security—
REP . PAUL RYAN : Absolutely.
MARTHA RADDATZ : —this country is facing. Both President Obama and Governor Romney have said they will prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, even if that means military action. Last week, former Defense Secretary Bob Gates said a strike on Iran&#8217;s facilities would not work and, quote, &quot;could prove catastrophic, haunting us for generations.&quot; Can the two of you be absolutely clear and specific to the American people, how effective would a military strike be?
NERMEEN SHAIKH : Glenn Greenwald, your comments on the Iran question?
GLENN GREENWALD : Right. Well, there again you see the core assumption of her question, the idea that there is no greater national security—it&#8217;s unclear if she said &quot;issue&quot; or &quot;threat.&quot; I think she just left out the word, but what she was clearly asserting was that, in terms of the array of national security challenges America faces, Iran is the most important, at the top of the list. This idea is ludicrous; it&#8217;s laughable. Iran has a minuscule military budget when compared to the United States. It is surrounded militarily, has been encircled by the United States for a decade. It has no capability to attack the United States and demonstrated no propensity to do so and would be, as Hillary Clinton once infamously said, obliterated, instantly destroyed, if it tried. So this idea that they pose any kind of national security threat to the United States is one of those myths that has been used to keep fear levels high and to justify continuous military spending and all sorts of abridgments at home to get the Americans to think we need to be in endless war. And here is the neutral moderator embracing that premise, though it&#8217;s not even debatable, as what will shape the entire Iran discussion.
Moreover, the question that she asked, if you noticed, was strictly about the efficacy of military strikes. Will a military strike on Iran advance American interests, or will it achieve a strategic goal? Whether the United States has the legal and moral right to attack Iran, whether it will create all kinds of havoc in the world, whether this will cause millions and millions and millions of Muslims to hate the United States even more is something that is just never considered, because the assumption that the United States has the legal and moral right to attack Iran is something that both the Republican and Democratic parties agree on and don&#8217;t even debate. By excluding third-party candidates, you ensure that that&#8217;s not even in question.
The same is true for the sanctions regime. Both parties, both candidates competed to say who supported a stronger sanction regime, which of course is causing extreme suffering for the Iranian people, the way the sanctions regime in Iraq for a decade not only caused suffering but killed hundreds of thousands. That, too, is completely excluded from the debate. So you don&#8217;t just have third-party candidates being excluded by—as a result of these rules; what you have is the vast bulk of political opinions and political facts being excluded because these moderators are chosen very specifically to ensure that they will embrace only the orthodoxy shared by both parties while posing as objective, neutral and non-ideological actors.
AMY GOODMAN : Glenn, we&#8217;re going to reconnect with you, so we&#8217;re going to drop our Democracy Now! video connection with you and go for a moment to the clip of third-party candidates, because Democracy Now! broke the sound barrier with the first presidential debate when we expanded the debate live, in real time, to include responses from third-party presidential contenders who were shut out of the official event. You know, the first debate was at University of Denver. We were just down the road in Littleton at a Comcast studio with similar podiums, with a blue backdrop just like the presidential candidates had. And after Jim Lehrer asked the question to President Obama, gave him two minutes, then to Mitt Romney, gave him two minutes, we&#8217;d stop the tape, and we&#8217;d say, &quot;Dr. Jill Stein, presidential candidate of the Green Party, you&#8217;ve got two minutes.&quot; And we put the same question to Rocky Anderson. I want to play an excerpt of Jill Stein&#8217;s response to moderator Jim Lehrer&#8217;s question about so-called &quot;entitlement&quot; programs and Social Security.
DR. JILL STEIN : It&#8217;s very important to point out that while we hear a very different narrative from Barack Obama and the Democrats than we do from Mitt Romney, with Mitt Romney&#8217;s narrative being usually harsh, scary, selfishness on steroids, and the Democratic narrative being warm and fuzzy and we&#8217;re all in this together, let&#8217;s just wait for things to get better, you know, it&#8217;s really important to look beyond the talk, to look at the walk, to look at what&#8217;s actually being proposed.
And Jeffrey Sachs at the University of Columbia has pointed out in his analysis of the budget proposals of both Obama and of Romney-Ryan—points out that they&#8217;re both aiming for essentially for the same targets. They&#8217;re both aiming for Social Security to be about 5 percent of GDP some years down the line, whether it&#8217;s four or eight years, and on Medicare, they&#8217;re both aiming for Medicare to be reduced to about 3.2 percent of GDP . So, the point is, while they have different scenarios, they both have the same targets.
AMY GOODMAN : That was Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. This is Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party responding to a question about healthcare reform.
ROCKY ANDERSON : Well, we&#8217;re talking here about &quot;Obamacare&quot; and &quot;Romneycare.&quot; I would call it &quot;Insurance Companycare,&quot; because they&#8217;re the ones that wrote it. They joined up with a very conservative foundation years ago to develop this plan, to make the American people buy this perverse product. Again, we&#8217;re the only country in the world that depends upon for-profit insurance companies for the majority of our coverage for healthcare, for those who are lucky enough to have it.
There are now over 50 million people without basic healthcare coverage in this country. The latest report indicates that there will be over 30 million people without essential healthcare coverage when &quot;Obamacare&quot; is fully implemented. That means misery. It means extended disease. It means extended illness and injuries. And it means the loss of lives.
AMY GOODMAN : That was Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party. And both Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party and Virgil Goode of the Constitution Party will be joining in the debate at the town hall, not tonight at Hofstra, but when we expand the debate tomorrow on Democracy Now! in a special two-hour broadcast called &quot;Expanding the Debate.&quot; And we&#8217;re hoping stations will take it around the country, or you can also go to democracynow.org. Glenn, let&#8217;s just talk to you on the phone right now. Glenn Greenwald, when you listen to these candidates giving their responses, third-party candidates, your thoughts?
GLENN GREENWALD : Well, I think you see exactly why it is that those candidates have been excluded. And I think, actually, what you&#8217;re doing in having these debates in a way that includes them is really quite innovative and important and really brilliant, because it illustrates two things. Number one is, when you have these candidates on the stage who are credible, who, as George said, represent parties who have ballot access and have been funded and recognized by lots of people, what it does is it illustrates just how mythological this idea is that the Democrats and Republicans are universes apart, that in reality they share all kinds of policy premises and, most importantly, serve exactly the same interests. Only by excluding those candidates and having the two parties focus on the tiny differences that they have and vociferously fight about them can this mythology be maintained that we have massive and real choice in this country.
The other aspect of it is, is that if you have, for example, Gary Johnson, who is the Libertarian Party candidate, and even a couple of other candidates on the right, who oftentimes are far more—far greater advocates of what progressives have long claimed to be their values—antiwar, pro-civil liberties, anti-harsh penal policies, anti-drug war—what then begins to happen, as well, is that the ideological and partisan spectrum begins to blur a great deal. Loyalties break down. Cultural identities can be subverted. And that, more than anything, is what the two parties do not want. They want both of their—their followers to think that the only way that these views can be represented is by clinging to either one of the two political parties. And introducing these third parties into the debate shows that actually the ideological spectrum is far less rigid and linear than these two parties insist on perpetuating. And that&#8217;s why they&#8217;re joined together at the hip and have a common interest in keeping this process as it is and why this collusion exists so smoothly, as George described, because they both want to keep these candidates out for the same reasons.
AMY GOODMAN : George Farah, do think that form determines content?
GEORGE FARAH : In many ways, yes. The exclusion of these viable third-party candidates from these kinds of actual presidential debate processes have the consequence of a certain ideological containment that Glenn is describing. Third parties are responsible for the abolition of slavery, women&#8217;s right to vote, child labor laws, unemployment compensation, Social Security, direct election of senators, public schools, public power—the list goes on and on. And when you exclude those third-party voices by structuring the debate in such an exclusionary format, you&#8217;re preventing third parties from actually breaking the bipartisan silence on critical issues, and doing exactly what Glenn is saying, which is presenting a narrow bandwidth in a wide manner, presenting the illusion that there&#8217;s extraordinary difference between the parties when in fact there&#8217;s [inaudible]—
AMY GOODMAN : Ralph Nader was almost arrested when he went to one of these presidential debates, when he was running for president.
GEORGE FARAH : In 2000, 64 percent of the American people wanted to see Ralph Nader in the presidential debates. He was on the ballot in the vast majority of states. But when he got a ticket to watch the debate in a viewing audience room adjacent to the debate stadium, he was escorted by police out of the actual presidential debate arena. Ultimately, he filed a lawsuit, and the Commission on Presidential Debates had to issue a formal apology and make a $25,000 donation to a pro-democracy organization.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : Glenn Greenwald, you&#8217;ve also talked about the fact that the vast majority of the most consequential issues facing the United States today will not be addressed during this debate process. Can you talk about some of those issues that will be and have been excluded?
GLENN GREENWALD : Oh, yes. I mean, the list of consequential issues that will be completely ignored by these debates because the two parties agree on them is vastly longer than the list of issues that they disagree on and will be talked about. Obviously, if you look at foreign policy, you see President Obama engaging in endless war; attacking various countries with drone, killing innocent people; claiming the right to assassinate American citizens without a whiff of transparency or due process; waging an unprecedented war on whistleblowers in the United States here at home, prosecuting more than all previous presidents combined; the United States&#8217;s vast, massive penal state, where we imprison more of our fellow citizens than all other country—than any other country in the world. We have a policy of punishing people for drug usage that is racist in both its application and design, putting huge numbers of minorities into prison for no good reason. There is massive poverty in the United States, a huge and exploding income gap in between the rich and the poor, greatest in many decades. None of these issues will be remotely addressed, because there&#8217;s nothing for the two parties to say on them other than the fact that &quot;we agree.&quot; And it&#8217;s by excluding those issues, some of the most consequential policy debates that the United States faces, including things like union rights and climate change—the list goes on—only by ignoring them can this myth be maintained that the two parties have some vastly different philosophical approach. And it&#8217;s the inclusion of third-party candidates, who would insist on talking about those, that would give the lie to this mythology.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : Glenn Greenwald, I want to turn to another issue, a foreign policy issue confronting the U.S., which is that the ACLU is at Guantánamo Bay this week to attend the pretrial hearings before a U.S. military commission in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-defendants. The five are charged with conspiring in the attacks of September 11th, 2001, and may face the death penalty if convicted. The ACLU hopes to block a so-called &quot;protective order&quot; that would prevent the revelation of classified details gathered during the defendants&#8217; CIA interrogations. ACLU attorney Hina Shamsi told the Associated Press, quote, &quot;What we are challenging is the censorship of the defendants&#8217; testimony based on their personal knowledge of the government&#8217;s torture and detention of them.&quot; Glenn Greenwald, can you talk about some of the concerns around this pretrial hearing?
GLENN GREENWALD : Sure. Well, first of all, let me just say that the—this story perfectly illustrates everything that we were just talking about, because four years ago, issues like military commissions and the way in which the government cheated in these cases by denying due process and trying to ensure guilt through these joke tribunals were widely debated. These were constantly talked about, and that&#8217;s because the Democrats pretended to have a different view than the Republicans—the Democrats opposed them, the Republicans favored them—and so you had conflict and controversy over them, and therefore they were included in the debate. Four years later, you have the Democrats fully on board with all of the injustices that President Obama and his party pretended to find so objectionable, and they therefore have disappeared completely from the realm of public debate. That&#8217;s what happens when you have full consensus between the two political parties.
What is happening at Guantánamo with these commissions is really quite extraordinary, because it is an attack on every single precept of Western justice that we have long considered to be the hallmark of any decent society, things like allowing lawyers to have access to their clients, to have access to evidence, to be able to have that aired in open court. What you really have is a process designed for two things: to ensure guilt, to ensure it, no matter what the evidence is, and, more importantly, to suppress relevant evidence that&#8217;s embarrassing to the United States. So these defendants are not permitted to talk about or to introduce evidence concerning the extraordinarily oppressive, torturous treatment to which they were subjected that impacts the statements that they gave that are to be used against them, that impacts the entire notion of justice surrounding the trial. You have secret evidence. You have evidence that is from witnesses that cannot be confronted. It is an extraordinary travesty of everything that we claim to believe in, but because it&#8217;s the Democrats doing it and the Republicans fully on board, it has disappeared from public discourse.
AMY GOODMAN : I wanted to ask you about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who spoke by video—videolink at a side meeting of the U.N. General Assembly from inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he&#8217;s taken refuge. Of course, Ecuador has granted him diplomatic asylum to prevent him from being extradited to Sweden. He is concerned about being sent to Sweden to answer questions about two women who have said that he sexually abused them, because he&#8217;s concerned that Sweden will then extradite him to the United States, where he&#8217;s concerned he could potentially face charges relating to WikiLeaks. This is an excerpt of his address at the U.N.
JULIAN ASSANGE : The U.S. administration has been trying to erect a national regime of secrecy, a national regime of obfuscation, a regime where any government employee revealing sensitive information to a media organization can be sentenced to death, life imprisonment or espionage, and journalists from the media organization with them. We should not underestimate the scale of the investigation which has happened into WikiLeaks.
AMY GOODMAN : That&#8217;s WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Glenn Greenwald, your final comment? Of course, these kinds of issues, from Guantánamo to Julian Assange—well, we don&#8217;t know. In a town hall meeting, I suppose they could be asked. But what do you think?
GLENN GREENWALD : Right, I think it&#8217;s—I can&#8217;t imagine Candy Crowley choosing a question that relates to the war on whistleblowers or Julian Assange or secrecy. But just think about that contrast. When Daniel Ellsberg was prosecuted by the Nixon administration, this was a huge story. It went to the Supreme Court. Liberals and progressives undertook his cause. He became a symbol of heroism and bravery. Here you have WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning facing exactly the same treatment, and it&#8217;s completely disappeared from public discourse. Progressives could not care less, even though, as every investigative journalist who does real work, including at major newspapers, will tell you, this has all created an incredible climate of fear that not only deters and intimidates their sources out of whistleblowing, but intimidates a lot of journalists, as well. And that&#8217;s what it&#8217;s designed to do. So you have this massive attack on transparency, this bolstering of secrecy, this undermining of investigative journalism, all concentrated within the WikiLeaks case, specifically the broader war on whistleblowers, and this, too, will be ignored, because both parties could not be more fully on board with it than if they tried.
AMY GOODMAN : We want to thank you, Glenn Greenwald, for being with us, columnist and blogger for The Guardian newspaper, author of With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful . We will link to your latest piece at The Guardian . And George Farah, thanks so much for joining us. Final question: the organizations that are trying to open these debates and wrest control away from this private corporation, which is the Commission on Presidential Debates?
GEORGE FARAH : We are making some actual ground. For the first time, we&#8217;ve had—we&#8217;ve convinced three of the 10 corporate sponsors that are financing the Commission on Presidential Debates to peel off. We have a—
AMY GOODMAN : YWCA pulled out?
GEORGE FARAH : YWCA , Philips Electronics and BBH advertising all pulled their support from the Commission on Presidential Debates. This is totally unprecedented. We&#8217;re resulting in the consistent process of actually making these secret contracts public. The media is beginning to really understand that this is a bipartisan corporation that doesn&#8217;t serve the interests of an electorate in which 40 percent of the voting population is independent. So, I think it&#8217;s just a matter of time, Amy, before we actually break the monopoly of the Commission on Presidential Debates.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re going to leave it there. I want to thank you for being with us, George Farah, founder and executive director of Open Debates, author of No Debate: How the Republican and Democratic Parties Secretly Control the Presidential Debates . Again, Democracy Now! will be broadcasting live from Hofstra with our own community forum, as well as broadcasting the town hall debate. You can start tuning in at 8:00 p.m. at democracynow.org. That&#8217;s 8:00 p.m. Eastern [Daylight] Time. Or tune in to your radio or television station that is broadcasting us. And tomorrow morning, a special two-hour broadcast of Democracy Now! , where we&#8217;ll be joined by three third-party candidates. They will answer the same questions put to the major-party presidential candidates at Hofstra. So you&#8217;ll hear all. This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . Back in a minute. AMYGOODMAN: Our guests are George Farah of Open Debates and Glenn Greenwald, who just wrote a very interesting piece about how—who gets to ask the questions. He is author of the book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. But his piece in The Guardian is the one we want to talk about. Let’s turn to a question on—by moderator Martha Raddatz during the vice-presidential debate, when she asked the two candidates, Paul Ryan and Vice President Joe Biden, this question.

MARTHARADDATZ: Let’s talk about Medicare and entitlements. Both Medicare and Social Security are going broke and taking a larger share of the budget in the process. Will benefits for Americans under these programs have to change for the programs to survive?

AMYGOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, can you comment on the question?

GLENNGREENWALD: Well, the question is grounded on an assumption that is not just dubious but very vociferously debated among the nation’s leading economists, which is the idea that Social Security and Medicare are going broke. In the case of Social Security, it’s almost impossible to make that case that it actually is going broke. The Social Security actually makes money. To the extent that it is burdened with that, it’s because other government programs, whether it be military spending or all kinds of corporate cronyism, create all kinds of debt that Social Security essentially ends up funding.

And with regard to Medicare, the same thing. Lots of economists have pointed out that Medicare, with a few minor alterations, will be economically sound for many decades. This notion that it’s going broke is something that lots of right-wing millionaires have promulgated as a way of pressuring Americans into feeling like they have to give up their basic entitlements.

And so, to watch Martha Raddatz, posing as an objective journalist, embracing what is an extremely controversial premise in her question, and then watching both candidates accept that assumption rather than challenge them, sort of is the microcosm of how these debates work, which is, they pose as objective, neutral moderators designed to have this wide-ranging debate, when in reality it takes place within a very suffocating, small confine of ideas. And as George has been detailing, that’s what it’s designed to do.

NERMEENSHAIKH: Well, I want to turn, Glenn, to another question that was raised during the debate, and this one on foreign policy. This is again moderator Martha Raddatz asking the candidates about Iran.

MARTHARADDATZ: Let’s move to Iran. I’d actually like to move to Iran, because there’s really no bigger national security—

REP. PAULRYAN: Absolutely.

MARTHARADDATZ: —this country is facing. Both President Obama and Governor Romney have said they will prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, even if that means military action. Last week, former Defense Secretary Bob Gates said a strike on Iran’s facilities would not work and, quote, "could prove catastrophic, haunting us for generations." Can the two of you be absolutely clear and specific to the American people, how effective would a military strike be?

NERMEENSHAIKH: Glenn Greenwald, your comments on the Iran question?

GLENNGREENWALD: Right. Well, there again you see the core assumption of her question, the idea that there is no greater national security—it’s unclear if she said "issue" or "threat." I think she just left out the word, but what she was clearly asserting was that, in terms of the array of national security challenges America faces, Iran is the most important, at the top of the list. This idea is ludicrous; it’s laughable. Iran has a minuscule military budget when compared to the United States. It is surrounded militarily, has been encircled by the United States for a decade. It has no capability to attack the United States and demonstrated no propensity to do so and would be, as Hillary Clinton once infamously said, obliterated, instantly destroyed, if it tried. So this idea that they pose any kind of national security threat to the United States is one of those myths that has been used to keep fear levels high and to justify continuous military spending and all sorts of abridgments at home to get the Americans to think we need to be in endless war. And here is the neutral moderator embracing that premise, though it’s not even debatable, as what will shape the entire Iran discussion.

Moreover, the question that she asked, if you noticed, was strictly about the efficacy of military strikes. Will a military strike on Iran advance American interests, or will it achieve a strategic goal? Whether the United States has the legal and moral right to attack Iran, whether it will create all kinds of havoc in the world, whether this will cause millions and millions and millions of Muslims to hate the United States even more is something that is just never considered, because the assumption that the United States has the legal and moral right to attack Iran is something that both the Republican and Democratic parties agree on and don’t even debate. By excluding third-party candidates, you ensure that that’s not even in question.

The same is true for the sanctions regime. Both parties, both candidates competed to say who supported a stronger sanction regime, which of course is causing extreme suffering for the Iranian people, the way the sanctions regime in Iraq for a decade not only caused suffering but killed hundreds of thousands. That, too, is completely excluded from the debate. So you don’t just have third-party candidates being excluded by—as a result of these rules; what you have is the vast bulk of political opinions and political facts being excluded because these moderators are chosen very specifically to ensure that they will embrace only the orthodoxy shared by both parties while posing as objective, neutral and non-ideological actors.

AMYGOODMAN: Glenn, we’re going to reconnect with you, so we’re going to drop our Democracy Now! video connection with you and go for a moment to the clip of third-party candidates, because Democracy Now! broke the sound barrier with the first presidential debate when we expanded the debate live, in real time, to include responses from third-party presidential contenders who were shut out of the official event. You know, the first debate was at University of Denver. We were just down the road in Littleton at a Comcast studio with similar podiums, with a blue backdrop just like the presidential candidates had. And after Jim Lehrer asked the question to President Obama, gave him two minutes, then to Mitt Romney, gave him two minutes, we’d stop the tape, and we’d say, "Dr. Jill Stein, presidential candidate of the Green Party, you’ve got two minutes." And we put the same question to Rocky Anderson. I want to play an excerpt of Jill Stein’s response to moderator Jim Lehrer’s question about so-called "entitlement" programs and Social Security.

DR. JILLSTEIN: It’s very important to point out that while we hear a very different narrative from Barack Obama and the Democrats than we do from Mitt Romney, with Mitt Romney’s narrative being usually harsh, scary, selfishness on steroids, and the Democratic narrative being warm and fuzzy and we’re all in this together, let’s just wait for things to get better, you know, it’s really important to look beyond the talk, to look at the walk, to look at what’s actually being proposed.

And Jeffrey Sachs at the University of Columbia has pointed out in his analysis of the budget proposals of both Obama and of Romney-Ryan—points out that they’re both aiming for essentially for the same targets. They’re both aiming for Social Security to be about 5 percent of GDP some years down the line, whether it’s four or eight years, and on Medicare, they’re both aiming for Medicare to be reduced to about 3.2 percent of GDP. So, the point is, while they have different scenarios, they both have the same targets.

AMYGOODMAN: That was Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. This is Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party responding to a question about healthcare reform.

ROCKYANDERSON: Well, we’re talking here about "Obamacare" and "Romneycare." I would call it "Insurance Companycare," because they’re the ones that wrote it. They joined up with a very conservative foundation years ago to develop this plan, to make the American people buy this perverse product. Again, we’re the only country in the world that depends upon for-profit insurance companies for the majority of our coverage for healthcare, for those who are lucky enough to have it.

There are now over 50 million people without basic healthcare coverage in this country. The latest report indicates that there will be over 30 million people without essential healthcare coverage when "Obamacare" is fully implemented. That means misery. It means extended disease. It means extended illness and injuries. And it means the loss of lives.

AMYGOODMAN: That was Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party. And both Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party and Virgil Goode of the Constitution Party will be joining in the debate at the town hall, not tonight at Hofstra, but when we expand the debate tomorrow on Democracy Now! in a special two-hour broadcast called "Expanding the Debate." And we’re hoping stations will take it around the country, or you can also go to democracynow.org. Glenn, let’s just talk to you on the phone right now. Glenn Greenwald, when you listen to these candidates giving their responses, third-party candidates, your thoughts?

GLENNGREENWALD: Well, I think you see exactly why it is that those candidates have been excluded. And I think, actually, what you’re doing in having these debates in a way that includes them is really quite innovative and important and really brilliant, because it illustrates two things. Number one is, when you have these candidates on the stage who are credible, who, as George said, represent parties who have ballot access and have been funded and recognized by lots of people, what it does is it illustrates just how mythological this idea is that the Democrats and Republicans are universes apart, that in reality they share all kinds of policy premises and, most importantly, serve exactly the same interests. Only by excluding those candidates and having the two parties focus on the tiny differences that they have and vociferously fight about them can this mythology be maintained that we have massive and real choice in this country.

The other aspect of it is, is that if you have, for example, Gary Johnson, who is the Libertarian Party candidate, and even a couple of other candidates on the right, who oftentimes are far more—far greater advocates of what progressives have long claimed to be their values—antiwar, pro-civil liberties, anti-harsh penal policies, anti-drug war—what then begins to happen, as well, is that the ideological and partisan spectrum begins to blur a great deal. Loyalties break down. Cultural identities can be subverted. And that, more than anything, is what the two parties do not want. They want both of their—their followers to think that the only way that these views can be represented is by clinging to either one of the two political parties. And introducing these third parties into the debate shows that actually the ideological spectrum is far less rigid and linear than these two parties insist on perpetuating. And that’s why they’re joined together at the hip and have a common interest in keeping this process as it is and why this collusion exists so smoothly, as George described, because they both want to keep these candidates out for the same reasons.

AMYGOODMAN: George Farah, do think that form determines content?

GEORGEFARAH: In many ways, yes. The exclusion of these viable third-party candidates from these kinds of actual presidential debate processes have the consequence of a certain ideological containment that Glenn is describing. Third parties are responsible for the abolition of slavery, women’s right to vote, child labor laws, unemployment compensation, Social Security, direct election of senators, public schools, public power—the list goes on and on. And when you exclude those third-party voices by structuring the debate in such an exclusionary format, you’re preventing third parties from actually breaking the bipartisan silence on critical issues, and doing exactly what Glenn is saying, which is presenting a narrow bandwidth in a wide manner, presenting the illusion that there’s extraordinary difference between the parties when in fact there’s [inaudible]—

AMYGOODMAN: Ralph Nader was almost arrested when he went to one of these presidential debates, when he was running for president.

GEORGEFARAH: In 2000, 64 percent of the American people wanted to see Ralph Nader in the presidential debates. He was on the ballot in the vast majority of states. But when he got a ticket to watch the debate in a viewing audience room adjacent to the debate stadium, he was escorted by police out of the actual presidential debate arena. Ultimately, he filed a lawsuit, and the Commission on Presidential Debates had to issue a formal apology and make a $25,000 donation to a pro-democracy organization.

NERMEENSHAIKH: Glenn Greenwald, you’ve also talked about the fact that the vast majority of the most consequential issues facing the United States today will not be addressed during this debate process. Can you talk about some of those issues that will be and have been excluded?

GLENNGREENWALD: Oh, yes. I mean, the list of consequential issues that will be completely ignored by these debates because the two parties agree on them is vastly longer than the list of issues that they disagree on and will be talked about. Obviously, if you look at foreign policy, you see President Obama engaging in endless war; attacking various countries with drone, killing innocent people; claiming the right to assassinate American citizens without a whiff of transparency or due process; waging an unprecedented war on whistleblowers in the United States here at home, prosecuting more than all previous presidents combined; the United States’s vast, massive penal state, where we imprison more of our fellow citizens than all other country—than any other country in the world. We have a policy of punishing people for drug usage that is racist in both its application and design, putting huge numbers of minorities into prison for no good reason. There is massive poverty in the United States, a huge and exploding income gap in between the rich and the poor, greatest in many decades. None of these issues will be remotely addressed, because there’s nothing for the two parties to say on them other than the fact that "we agree." And it’s by excluding those issues, some of the most consequential policy debates that the United States faces, including things like union rights and climate change—the list goes on—only by ignoring them can this myth be maintained that the two parties have some vastly different philosophical approach. And it’s the inclusion of third-party candidates, who would insist on talking about those, that would give the lie to this mythology.

NERMEENSHAIKH: Glenn Greenwald, I want to turn to another issue, a foreign policy issue confronting the U.S., which is that the ACLU is at Guantánamo Bay this week to attend the pretrial hearings before a U.S. military commission in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-defendants. The five are charged with conspiring in the attacks of September 11th, 2001, and may face the death penalty if convicted. The ACLU hopes to block a so-called "protective order" that would prevent the revelation of classified details gathered during the defendants’ CIA interrogations. ACLU attorney Hina Shamsi told the Associated Press, quote, "What we are challenging is the censorship of the defendants’ testimony based on their personal knowledge of the government’s torture and detention of them." Glenn Greenwald, can you talk about some of the concerns around this pretrial hearing?

GLENNGREENWALD: Sure. Well, first of all, let me just say that the—this story perfectly illustrates everything that we were just talking about, because four years ago, issues like military commissions and the way in which the government cheated in these cases by denying due process and trying to ensure guilt through these joke tribunals were widely debated. These were constantly talked about, and that’s because the Democrats pretended to have a different view than the Republicans—the Democrats opposed them, the Republicans favored them—and so you had conflict and controversy over them, and therefore they were included in the debate. Four years later, you have the Democrats fully on board with all of the injustices that President Obama and his party pretended to find so objectionable, and they therefore have disappeared completely from the realm of public debate. That’s what happens when you have full consensus between the two political parties.

What is happening at Guantánamo with these commissions is really quite extraordinary, because it is an attack on every single precept of Western justice that we have long considered to be the hallmark of any decent society, things like allowing lawyers to have access to their clients, to have access to evidence, to be able to have that aired in open court. What you really have is a process designed for two things: to ensure guilt, to ensure it, no matter what the evidence is, and, more importantly, to suppress relevant evidence that’s embarrassing to the United States. So these defendants are not permitted to talk about or to introduce evidence concerning the extraordinarily oppressive, torturous treatment to which they were subjected that impacts the statements that they gave that are to be used against them, that impacts the entire notion of justice surrounding the trial. You have secret evidence. You have evidence that is from witnesses that cannot be confronted. It is an extraordinary travesty of everything that we claim to believe in, but because it’s the Democrats doing it and the Republicans fully on board, it has disappeared from public discourse.

AMYGOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who spoke by video—videolink at a side meeting of the U.N. General Assembly from inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he’s taken refuge. Of course, Ecuador has granted him diplomatic asylum to prevent him from being extradited to Sweden. He is concerned about being sent to Sweden to answer questions about two women who have said that he sexually abused them, because he’s concerned that Sweden will then extradite him to the United States, where he’s concerned he could potentially face charges relating to WikiLeaks. This is an excerpt of his address at the U.N.

JULIANASSANGE: The U.S. administration has been trying to erect a national regime of secrecy, a national regime of obfuscation, a regime where any government employee revealing sensitive information to a media organization can be sentenced to death, life imprisonment or espionage, and journalists from the media organization with them. We should not underestimate the scale of the investigation which has happened into WikiLeaks.

AMYGOODMAN: That’s WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Glenn Greenwald, your final comment? Of course, these kinds of issues, from Guantánamo to Julian Assange—well, we don’t know. In a town hall meeting, I suppose they could be asked. But what do you think?

GLENNGREENWALD: Right, I think it’s—I can’t imagine Candy Crowley choosing a question that relates to the war on whistleblowers or Julian Assange or secrecy. But just think about that contrast. When Daniel Ellsberg was prosecuted by the Nixon administration, this was a huge story. It went to the Supreme Court. Liberals and progressives undertook his cause. He became a symbol of heroism and bravery. Here you have WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning facing exactly the same treatment, and it’s completely disappeared from public discourse. Progressives could not care less, even though, as every investigative journalist who does real work, including at major newspapers, will tell you, this has all created an incredible climate of fear that not only deters and intimidates their sources out of whistleblowing, but intimidates a lot of journalists, as well. And that’s what it’s designed to do. So you have this massive attack on transparency, this bolstering of secrecy, this undermining of investigative journalism, all concentrated within the WikiLeaks case, specifically the broader war on whistleblowers, and this, too, will be ignored, because both parties could not be more fully on board with it than if they tried.

AMYGOODMAN: We want to thank you, Glenn Greenwald, for being with us, columnist and blogger for The Guardian newspaper, author of With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. We will link to your latest piece at The Guardian. And George Farah, thanks so much for joining us. Final question: the organizations that are trying to open these debates and wrest control away from this private corporation, which is the Commission on Presidential Debates?

GEORGEFARAH: We are making some actual ground. For the first time, we’ve had—we’ve convinced three of the 10 corporate sponsors that are financing the Commission on Presidential Debates to peel off. We have a—

AMYGOODMAN:YWCA pulled out?

GEORGEFARAH:YWCA, Philips Electronics and BBH advertising all pulled their support from the Commission on Presidential Debates. This is totally unprecedented. We’re resulting in the consistent process of actually making these secret contracts public. The media is beginning to really understand that this is a bipartisan corporation that doesn’t serve the interests of an electorate in which 40 percent of the voting population is independent. So, I think it’s just a matter of time, Amy, before we actually break the monopoly of the Commission on Presidential Debates.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to leave it there. I want to thank you for being with us, George Farah, founder and executive director of Open Debates, author of No Debate: How the Republican and Democratic Parties Secretly Control the Presidential Debates. Again, Democracy Now! will be broadcasting live from Hofstra with our own community forum, as well as broadcasting the town hall debate. You can start tuning in at 8:00 p.m. at democracynow.org. That’s 8:00 p.m. Eastern [Daylight] Time. Or tune in to your radio or television station that is broadcasting us. And tomorrow morning, a special two-hour broadcast of Democracy Now!, where we’ll be joined by three third-party candidates. They will answer the same questions put to the major-party presidential candidates at Hofstra. So you’ll hear all. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Back in a minute.

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Tue, 16 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0400Expanding the VP Debate: Third-Party Candidates Challenge Biden & Ryan on War, Economy, Healthcarehttp://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/12/expanding_the_vp_debate_third_party
tag:democracynow.org,2012-10-12:en/story/a4b12e AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re on the road in Albuquerque, New Mexico, headed to Silver City , and then tonight we&#8217;ll be in Bisbee, Arizona , followed by tomorrow at 1:00 in [Tucson] and then tomorrow night in Phoenix .
But right now, with less than 24 days before the 2012 general election, the two vice-presidential candidates squared off in their only debate Thursday night, on the campus of Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. For about an hour and a half, the candidates aggressively challenged each other on foreign and domestic policy issues as they sat at a table with moderator Martha Raddatz of ABC News. Raddatz pressed them with questions on the deaths of Americans at the U.S. embassy in Libya, taxes, Medicare, Social Security, the budget deficit, terrorism and Afghanistan. She also asked each of the candidates, both of whom are Catholic, about how their personal beliefs affect their views on abortion.
Well, today, Democracy Now! brings you our second &quot;Expanding the Debate&quot; special. We first broke the sound barrier during the presidential debate in Denver by pausing after President Obama&#8217;s and Mitt Romney&#8217;s answers to get real-time responses from Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party, both of those parties&#8217; presidential candidates. Well, today, we do the same, but this time with their running mates. Cheri Honkala, with the Green Party, she is the vice-presidential nominee in the 2012 election. She&#8217;s also national coordinator of the Poor People&#8217;s Economic Human Rights Campaign. And Luis Rodriguez of the Justice Party is a noted Chicano writer and a gang expert and interventionist. His 15 published books include the bestselling 1993 memoir Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. and its 2011 sequel, It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing . He&#8217;s co-founder of the Network for Revolutionary Change.
Vice-presidential candidates Luis Rodriguez and Cheri Honkala, we welcome them into the debate, but we will go to them in a moment. First, we begin with the debate moderator, Martha Raddatz.
MARTHA RADDATZ : ...the state of our economy. The number one issue here at home is jobs. The percentage of unemployed just fell below 8 percent for the first time in 43 months. The Obama administration had projected that it would fall below 6 percent now after the addition of close to a trillion dollars in stimulus money. So will both of you level with the American people? Can you get unemployment to under 6 percent, and how long will it take?
VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN : I don&#8217;t know how long it will take.
MARTHA RADDATZ : Vice President Biden.
VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN : We can and we will get it under 6 percent.
Let&#8217;s look at the—let&#8217;s take a look at the facts. Let&#8217;s look at where we were when we came to office. The economy was in free fall. We had—the Great Recession hit. Nine million people lost their job, 1.7—$1.6 trillion in wealth lost in equity in your homes and retirement accounts from the middle class.
We knew we had to act for the middle class. We immediately went out and rescued General Motors. We went ahead and made sure that we cut taxes for the middle class. And in addition to that, when that—and when that occurred, what did Romney do? Romney said, &quot;No, let Detroit go bankrupt.&quot; We moved in and helped people refinance their homes. Governor Romney said, &quot;No, let foreclosures hit the bottom.&quot;
But it shouldn&#8217;t be surprising for a guy who says 47 percent of the American people are unwilling to take responsibility for their own lives. My friend recently, in a speech in Washington, said 30 percent of the American people are takers. These people are my mom and dad, the people I grew up with, my neighbors. They pay more effective tax than Governor Romney pays in his federal income tax. They are elderly people who in fact are living off of Social Security. They are veterans and people fighting in Afghanistan right now who are, quote, &quot;not paying any taxes.&quot;
I&#8217;ve had it up to here with this notion that 47 percent—it&#8217;s about time they take some responsibility here. And instead of signing pledges to Grover Norquist not to ask the wealthiest among us to contribute to bring back the middle class, they should be signing a pledge saying to the middle class, &quot;We&#8217;re going to level the playing field. We&#8217;re going to give you a fair shot again. We are going to not repeat the mistakes we made in the past by having a different set of rules for Wall Street and Main Street,&quot; making sure that we continue to hemorrhage these tax cuts for the super-wealthy.
They&#8217;re pushing the continuation of a tax cut that will give an additional $500 billion in tax cuts to 120,000 families. And they&#8217;re holding hostage the middle-class tax cut because they say, &quot;We won&#8217;t pass—we won&#8217;t continue the middle-class tax cut unless you give the tax cut for the super-wealthy.&quot; It&#8217;s about time they take some responsibility.
MARTHA RADDATZ : Mr. Ryan.
REP . PAUL RYAN : Joe and I are from similar towns. He&#8217;s from Scranton, Pennsylvania; I&#8217;m from Janesville, Wisconsin. You know what the unemployment rate in Scranton is today?
VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN : I sure do.
REP . PAUL RYAN : It&#8217;s 10 percent.
VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN : Yeah.
REP . PAUL RYAN : You know what it was the day you guys came in? Eight-point-five percent.
VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN : Yeah.
REP . PAUL RYAN : That&#8217;s how it&#8217;s going all around America. Look—
VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN : You don&#8217;t read the statistics.
REP . PAUL RYAN : Look—
VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN : That&#8217;s not how it&#8217;s going. It&#8217;s going down.
MARTHA RADDATZ : This is his two-minute answer, please.
REP . PAUL RYAN : Look, did they come in and inherit a tough situation? Absolutely. But we&#8217;re going in the wrong direction. Look at where we are. The economy is barely limping along. It&#8217;s growing at 1.3 percent. That&#8217;s slower than it grew last year, and last year was slower than the year before. Job growth in September was slower than it was in August, and August was slower than it was in July. We&#8217;re heading in the wrong direction.
Twenty-three million Americans are struggling for work today. Fifteen percent of Americans are living in poverty today. This is not what a real recovery looks like. We need real reforms for a real recovery, and that&#8217;s exactly what Mitt Romney and I are proposing. It&#8217;s a five-point plan: get America energy-independent in North America by the end of the decade; help people who are hurting get the skills they need to get the jobs they want; get this deficit and debt under control to prevent a debt crisis; make trade work for America so we can make more things in America and sell them overseas and champion small businesses; don&#8217;t raise taxes on small businesses, because they&#8217;re our job creators.
He talks about Detroit. Mitt Romney&#8217;s a car guy. They keep misquoting him, but let me tell you about the Mitt Romney I know. This is a guy who—I was talking to a family in Northborough, Massachusetts, the other day, Sheryl and Mark Nixon. Their kids were hit in a car crash, four of them—two of them, Rob and Reed, were paralyzed. The Romneys didn&#8217;t know them. They went to the same church. They never met before. Mitt asked if he could come over on Christmas. He brought his boys, his wife and gifts. Later on he said, &quot;I know you&#8217;re struggling, Mark. Don&#8217;t worry about their college; I&#8217;ll pay for it.&quot;
When Mark told me this story—because you know what? Mitt Romney doesn&#8217;t tell these stories. The Nixons told this story. When he told me this story, he said it wasn&#8217;t the help, the cash help; it&#8217;s that he gave his time. And he has consistently. This is a man who gave 30 percent of his income to charity, more than the two of us combined. Mitt Romney&#8217;s a good man. He cares about a hundred percent of Americans in this country.
And with respect to that quote, I think the vice president very well knows that sometimes the words don&#8217;t come out of your mouth the right way.
VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN : But I always say what I mean. And so does Romney.
REP . PAUL RYAN : We want everybody to succeed. We want to get people out of poverty, in the middle class, on to lives of self-sufficiency. We believe in opportunity and upward mobility. That&#8217;s what we&#8217;re going to push for in a Romney administration.
AMY GOODMAN : Luis Rodriguez, you&#8217;re the vice-presidential nominee for the Justice Party. Can you get unemployment under 6 percent? And how? You have two minutes.
LUIS RODRIGUEZ : One, you cannot do it relying on the old industrial basis of this country, because it&#8217;s gone. Technology has changed everything. The whole scenario has changed. Now you have what&#8217;s called the Wal-Marting of America, where people who do work are underemployed and cannot survive with those jobs—unrepresented, unorganized and low-paid.
So, what you have to do is think of a whole short range and long range. The short range would be, do what was supposed to be done. Get jobs to build our country—the infrastructure, the buildings. Get housing done by people. Give people the hammers and nails, and let them build this country from the bottom up. Give people the imagination, so they can get into the technology and utilize it to really have meaningful jobs.
In the long run, I do think it has to be structural changes. We have to restructure our economy so that everybody can work, everybody&#8217;s passions can be their profession, and we have a whole different way of looking at jobs than the way that&#8217;s constantly being done by both the Republicans and the Democrats.
AMY GOODMAN : Cheri Honkala, your response, vice-presidential nominee for the Green Party?
CHERI HONKALA : Well, first of all, I just want to thank you, Amy, for having us on today and having this debate. What we would do is we would green the economy, making sure that we put jobs that would last for a long time, that would save our environment, and that would put people to work. We would also turn the unemployment centers into employment centers, and we would put homeless people to work renovating abandoned houses. We have more abandoned houses than we have homeless people in this country, and we could do something by putting them to work.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re going to turn back to Martha Raddatz, debate moderator, in Kentucky.
MARTHA RADDATZ : Let&#8217;s talk about Medicare and entitlements. Both Medicare and Social Security are going broke and taking a larger share of the budget in the process. Will benefits for Americans under these programs have to change for the programs to survive, Mr. Ryan?
REP . PAUL RYAN : Absolutely. Medicare and Social Security are going bankrupt. These are indisputable facts.
Look, when I look at these programs—we&#8217;ve all had tragedies in our lives—I think about what they&#8217;ve done for my own family. My mom and I had my grandmother move in with us who was facing Alzheimer&#8217;s. Medicare was there for her, just like it&#8217;s there for my mom right now, who&#8217;s a Florida senior. After my dad died, my mom and I got Social Security survivors benefits—helped me pay for college. It helped her go back to college in her fifties, where she started a small business because of the new skills she got. She paid all of her taxes, on the promise that these programs would be there for her. We will honor this promise.
And the best way to do it is reform it for my generation. You see, if you reform these programs for my generation, people 54 and below, you can guarantee they don&#8217;t change for people in or near retirement, which is precisely what Mitt Romney and I are proposing.
Look what—look what &quot;Obamacare&quot; does. &quot;Obamacare&quot; takes $716 billion from Medicare to spend on &quot;Obamacare.&quot; Even their own chief actuary at Medicare backs this up. He says you can&#8217;t spend the same dollar twice. You can&#8217;t claim that this money goes to Medicare and &quot;Obamacare.&quot; And then they put this new &quot;Obamacare&quot; board in charge of cutting Medicare each and every year in ways that will lead to denied care for current seniors. This board, by the way, it&#8217;s 15 people. The president&#8217;s supposed to appoint them next year. And not one of them even has to have medical training.
And Social Security? If we don&#8217;t shore up Social Security, when we run out of the IOUs, when the program goes bankrupt, a 25 percent across-the-board benefit cut kicks in on current seniors in the middle of their retirement. We&#8217;re going to stop that from happening.
They haven&#8217;t put a credible solution on the table. He&#8217;ll tell you about vouchers. He&#8217;ll say all these things to try and scare people.
Here&#8217;s what we&#8217;re saying: give younger people, when they become Medicare-eligible, guaranteed coverage options that you can&#8217;t be denied, including traditional Medicare. Choose your plan, and then Medicare subsidizes your premiums, not as much for the wealthy people, more coverage for middle-income people, and total out-of-pocket coverage for the poor and the sick. Choice and competition. We would rather have 50 million future seniors determine how their Medicare is delivered to them, instead of 15 bureaucrats deciding what, if, where, when they get it.
MARTHA RADDATZ : Vice President Biden, two minutes.
VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN : You know, I heard that death panel argument from Sarah Palin. It seems every vice-presidential debate, I hear this kind of stuff about panels. But let&#8217;s talk about Medicare.
What we did is we saved $716 billion and put it back, applied it to Medicare. We cut the cost of Medicare. We stopped overpaying insurance companies when doctors and hospitals—the AMA supported what we did. AARP endorsed what we did. And it extended the life of Medicare to 2024. They want to wipe this all out. It also gave more benefits. Any senior out there, ask yourself, do you have more benefits today? You do. If you&#8217;re near the donut hole, you have 800—$600 more to help your prescription drug costs. You get wellness visits without co-pays. They wipe all of this out, and Medicare goes—becomes insolvent in 2016, number one.
Number two, guaranteed benefit—it&#8217;s a voucher. When they first proposed—when the congressman had his first voucher program, the CBO said it would cost $6,400 a year, Martha, more for every senior 55 and below when they got there. He knew that, yet he gathered all the guys in Congress and women in the Republican Party to vote for it. Governor Romney, knowing that, said, &quot;I—I would sign it, were I there.&quot; Who you believe? The AMA ? Me? A guy who&#8217;s fought his whole life for this? Or somebody who had actually put in motion a plan that knowingly cut—added $6,400-a-year more to the cost of Medicare? Now they got a new plan. Trust me, it&#8217;s not going to cost you any more. Folks, follow your instincts on this one.
And with regard to Social Security, we will not—we will not privatize it. If we had listened to Romney, to Governor Romney and the congressman during the Bush years, imagine where all those seniors would be now if their money had been in the market. Their ideas are old, and their ideas are bad, and they eliminate the guarantee of Medicare.
AMY GOODMAN : Green Party vice-presidential nominee Cheri Honkala, your approach to Medicare, its problems, and what you&#8217;ll do about it?
CHERI HONKALA : First of all, we see healthcare as a basic human right. We see that everybody in America should have access to healthcare. We believe in the U.S. single-payer healthcare, and we want to have Medicare for all in this country. We have enough to go around, and everybody should be guaranteed an opportunity to be healthy, productive citizens.
AMY GOODMAN : Medicare for all, what does that mean?
CHERI HONKALA : It means that we want a single-payer system. We think that everybody should be covered, from rehabilitation, drug and alcohol programs, to operations, to their dental coverage covered. You name it, people should have quality healthcare in this country, and they should be guaranteed it, just like the Medicare system that we have. It should be expanded to cover everyone.
AMY GOODMAN : Luis Rodriguez, vice-presidential candidate of the Justice Party, your response?
LUIS RODRIGUEZ : Yeah, first of all, the whole medical system has to be taken out of the profit world, profit market, taken out of the market system. It&#8217;s an essential, as Cheri said. It&#8217;s something that everybody needs. We spend billions and billions of dollars wasting money, just because people aren&#8217;t being taken care of, the illnesses and the sicknesses they get at the back end because we don&#8217;t do enough to prevent, to help, to maintain, to give people the care they need.
And I think this is something that government should essentially have to do, because it&#8217;s got to be taken out of the hands of the insurance companies, out of the big hospitals. Healthcare cost, as you know, has gone astronomical. And then what we&#8217;re asking the government is, give me a little break, out of something that&#8217;s taken completely out of our hands. I think it does have to come back.
Single payer, as everybody has said, extend Medicare to everybody, not just to the elderly, but extend it to every kid, every adult, every youth. Make sure that everybody has access to the great technological innovations there are in medicine, but also just to understand, our bodies are our medicine. We don&#8217;t need to be given a lot of drugs. Pharmaceutical companies throw things in there. We can just need help in making own bodies heal, which requires good eating, good exercise, a sense of less stress, of living in a world that doesn&#8217;t demand too much of you, but making sure that the government ensures this as an essential need, not just something that somebody should be able to go to a market and try to profit off of it like is being done today.
AMY GOODMAN : We are expanding the debate, the only vice-presidential debate in this election season. We go to break and then come back. This is Democracy Now! This is what democracy sounds like.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : We are expanding the debate, the only vice-presidential debate that&#8217;s taking place this election season. We are joined by Luis Rodriguez, the vice-presidential nominee for the Justice Party, and Cheri Honkala, the vice-presidential nominee for the Green Party. In Kentucky, Mitt Romney&#8217;s vice-presidential nominee is there, Paul Ryan, as well as Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee. Martha Raddatz is the debate moderator in Kentucky.
MARTHA RADDATZ : I want to know how you do the math and have this increase in defense spending.
VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN : Two trillion dollars.
REP . PAUL RYAN : You don&#8217;t cut defense by a trillion dollars. That&#8217;s what we&#8217;re talking about. The additional trillion—
MARTHA RADDATZ : And what national security issues justify an increase?
VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN : Who&#8217;s cutting it by a trillion?
REP . PAUL RYAN : We&#8217;re going to cut 80,000 soldiers, 20,000 marines, 120 cargo planes. We&#8217;re going to push the Joint Strike Fighter out.
MARTHA RADDATZ : Drawing down in one war—
REP . PAUL RYAN : We&#8217;re cutting missile defense.
MARTHA RADDATZ : —and one more [inaudible]—
REP . PAUL RYAN : If these cuts go through, our Navy will be the small it has—the smallest it has been since before World War I. This invites weakness.
Look, do we believe in peace through strength? You bet we do. And that means you don&#8217;t impose these devastating cuts on our military. So we&#8217;re saying, don&#8217;t cut the military by a trillion dollars—not increase it by a trillion, don&#8217;t cut it by a trillion dollars.
MARTHA RADDATZ : Quickly, Vice President Biden, on this, then I want to move on.
VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN : Look, we don&#8217;t cut it. And I might add, this so-called—I know we don&#8217;t want to use the fancy word &quot;sequester,&quot; this automatic cut, that was part of a debt deal that they asked for. And let me tell you what my friend said at a press conference announcing his support of the deal. He said—and I&#8217;m paraphrasing — &quot;We&#8217;ve been looking for this moment for a long time.
MARTHA RADDATZ : And I&#8217;d like to move on to Afghanistan, please.
REP . PAUL RYAN : OK.
MARTHA RADDATZ : Now, we&#8217;ve reached the recruiting goal for Afghan forces. We&#8217;ve degraded al-Qaeda. So tell me, why not leave now? What more can we really accomplish? Is it worth more American lives?
REP . PAUL RYAN : We don&#8217;t want to lose the gains we&#8217;ve gotten. We want to make sure that the Taliban does not come back in and give al-Qaeda a safe haven. We agree with the administration on their 2014 transition.
Look, when I think about Afghanistan, I think about the incredible job that our troops have done. You&#8217;ve been there more than the two of us combined. First time I was there in 2002, it was amazing to me what they were facing. When I went to the Arghandab Valley in Kandahar before the surge, I sat down with a young private in the 82nd from the Menominee Indian Reservation, who would tell me what he did every day, and I was in awe. And to see what they had in front of them, and then to go back there in December to go throughout Helmand with the Marines to see what they had accomplished, it&#8217;s nothing short of amazing. What we don&#8217;t want to do is lose the gains we&#8217;ve gotten.
Now, we&#8217;ve disagreed from time to time on a few issues. We would have more likely taken into account the recommendations from our commanders—General Petraeus, Admiral Mullen—on troop levels throughout this year&#8217;s fighting season. We&#8217;ve been skeptical about negotiations with the Taliban, especially while they&#8217;re shooting at us. But we want to see the 2014 transition be successful. And that means we want to make sure our commanders have what they need to make sure that it is successful, so that this does not once again become a launching pad for terrorists.
MARTHA RADDATZ : Vice President Biden.
VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN : Martha, let&#8217;s keep our eye on the ball—the reason I&#8217;ve been in and out of Afghanistan and Iraq 20 times, I&#8217;ve been up in the Kunar Valley, I&#8217;ve been throughout that whole country, mostly in a helicopter and sometimes in a vehicle. The fact is, we went there for one reason: to get those people who killed Americans—al-Qaeda. We&#8217;ve decimated al-Qaeda central. We have eliminated Osama bin Laden. That was our purpose.
And, in fact, in the meantime, what we said we would do, we would help train the Afghan military. It&#8217;s their responsibility to take over their own security. That&#8217;s why, with 49 of our allies in Afghanistan, we&#8217;ve agreed on a gradual drawdown so we&#8217;re out of there by the year—in the year 2014.
My friend and the governor say it&#8217;s based on conditions, which means it depends. It does not depend for us. It is the responsibility of the Afghans to take care of their own security. We have trained over 315,000, mostly without incident. There have been more than two dozen cases of green-on-blue, where Americans have been killed. If we do not—if the—if the measures the military has taken do not take hold, we will not go on joint patrols, we will not train in the field. We&#8217;ll only train in the—in the Army bases that exist there.
But we are leaving. We are leaving in 2014, period. And in the process, we&#8217;re going to be saving, over the next 10 years, another $800 billion. We&#8217;ve been in this war for over a decade. The primary objective is almost completed. Now all we&#8217;re doing is putting the Kabul government in a position to be able to maintain their own security. It&#8217;s their responsibility, not America&#8217;s.
AMY GOODMAN : Justice Party vice-presidential nominee Luis Rodriguez, respond on the issue of defense spending, as well as Afghanistan.
LUIS RODRIGUEZ : We have, unfortunately, an empire. The U.S. is behind this empire. We have the largest military force in the world. We have caused more damage, more destruction, more terrorism to happen than any other force in this world. I know this is hard to imagine anybody saying this, but I don&#8217;t need an intelligence mechanism to know that we have been behind so much war, so much destruction. It&#8217;s time for the American people to not have our soldiers, our mothers and brothers and sisters, out in the wars anymore in places that we don&#8217;t belong, in places that don&#8217;t resolve anything. In spite of the war against terror, I don&#8217;t feel any safer. Nobody feels any safer. I think this is about time that this empire were to end. It&#8217;s hurting our economy. It&#8217;s hurting our politics. We cannot survive as people in this world if we continually go around the world thinking that our issues, our demands and what we&#8217;re about is more important than anybody else in the world.
I am for making sure that this world is peaceful, which means you cannot have a military means of getting peace. You cannot have unmannned drones bombing civilians, no matter where it is in this world. So I do feel that we have to back off completely from the defense budget, which is the single-largest means that money is being taken away out of our economy, putting it back in military, put it back in defense industries that are making millions of dollars off our taxes and our sweat and blood.
AMY GOODMAN : Cheri Honkala, Green Party vice-presidential nominee, on the issue of defense and war spending in this country and Afghanistan?
CHERI HONKALA : We need to bring our troops home. We need to stop being the police force for the world. We need to stay out of other people&#8217;s business and their fight for democracy. And we need to take that money, and we need to bring it back home. We need to bring our soldiers back home, turn them into organic farmers, help—have them be busy rebuilding America. The answer is not with war. The answer is creating a better America for all of us to live in.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re going to go right now to closing statements. Martha Raddatz at the—in Kentucky.
MARTHA RADDATZ : OK, we now turn to the candidates for their closing statements. Thank you, gentlemen. And that coin toss, again, has Vice President Biden starting with the closing statement.
VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN : Well, let—let me say at the outset that I want to thank you, Martha, for doing this, and Centre College.
The fact is that we&#8217;re in a situation where we inherited a god-awful circumstance. People are in real trouble. We acted to move to bring relief to the people who need the most help now. And—and in the process, we—in case you haven&#8217;t noticed, we have strong disagreements. But I—you probably detected my frustration with their attitude about the American people. My friend says that 30 percent of the American people are takers. They—Romney points out, 47 percent of the people won&#8217;t take responsibility. He&#8217;s talking about my mother and father. He&#8217;s talking about the places I grew up in, my neighbors in Scranton and Claymont. He&#8217;s talking about—he&#8217;s talking about the people that have built this country. All they&#8217;re looking for, Martha—all they&#8217;re looking for is an even shot. When they&#8217;ve been given the shot, they&#8217;ve done it. They&#8217;ve done it. Whenever you&#8217;ve leveled the playing field, they&#8217;ve been able to move. And they want a little bit of peace of mind. And the president and I are not going to rest until that playing field is leveled, they in fact have a clear shot, and they have peace of mind, until they can turn to their kid and say with a degree of confidence, &quot;Honey, it&#8217;s going to be OK. It&#8217;s going to be OK.&quot; That&#8217;s what this is all about.
MARTHA RADDATZ : Congressman Ryan.
REP . PAUL RYAN : I want to thank you, as well, Martha; Danville, Kentucky; Centre College. And I want to thank you, Joe. It&#8217;s been an honor to engage in this critical debate.
We face a very big choice. What kind of country are we going to be? What kind of country are we going to give our kids? President Obama, he had his chance. He made his choices. His economic agenda—more spending, more borrowing, higher taxes, a government takeover of healthcare—it&#8217;s not working. It&#8217;s failed to create the jobs we need. Twenty-three million Americans are struggling for work today. Fifteen percent of Americans are in poverty. This is not what a real recovery looks like. You deserve better.
Mitt Romney and I want to earn your support. We&#8217;re offering real reforms for a real recovery for every American. Mitt Romney—his experience, his ideas, his solutions—is uniquely qualified to get this job done. At a time when we have a jobs crisis in America, wouldn&#8217;t it be nice to have a job creator in the White House?
The choice is clear: a stagnant economy that promotes more government dependency, or a dynamic, growing economy that promotes opportunity and jobs. Mitt Romney and I will not duck the tough issues. And we will not blame others for the next four years. We will take responsibility. And we will not try to replace our founding principles; we will reapply our founding principles. The choice is clear, and the choice rests with you. And we ask you for your vote. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN : Cheri Honkala, you have one minute for your final statement.
CHERI HONKALA : As a formerly homeless mother, I know your pains out there. We can have a country that can be free from unemployment, hunger and homelessness. Let&#8217;s occupy the voting booths on Election Day. Let&#8217;s vote Green and put two women in the White House, so that we can take back America and have another country and another world.
AMY GOODMAN : And, Luis Rodriguez, vice-presidential nominee for the Justice Party, your final statement.
LUIS RODRIGUEZ : Yeah, I think this is not about recovery, but a regeneration, of bringing back the idea, the imaginations, the power that we hold in our hands into the political process, into the economy. This country is vast. It&#8217;s got a lot of latent talent and attributes in our kids, in our working class, in people who build their homes and see their homes being taken away. This is a period of the worst corporate thievery that we&#8217;ve seen in our history, and nobody is putting them accountable. Let&#8217;s take it back and put it in our hands, in the hands of the people who work, in the hands of the people who can imagine, and regenerate our economy completely by making sure that everybody&#8217;s needs are met, everybody&#8217;s housing is taken care of, everybody&#8217;s medical needs, educational needs. No more corporation of the education, where kids are having $60,000 to $70,000 debt just to go to school, because they have to now, because they can&#8217;t survive without it. We have to re-imagine another America, another world, a clean, environmental—justice in our environment, justice in the economy, justice in our politics.
AMY GOODMAN : Luis Rodriguez, vice-presidential nominee for the Justice Party; Cheri Honkala, vice-presidential nominee for the Green Party, joining Paul Ryan of the Republican Party and Vice President Joe Biden of the Democratic Party in this only vice-presidential debate of the 2012 election. And that does it for our &quot;Expanding the Debates&quot; series until next week, when we&#8217;ll be broadcasting from Hofstra.
We are continuing our 100-city Silenced Majority 2012 tour at noon in Silver City, New Mexico , at the Besse-Forward Global Resource Center at Western New Mexico University, then on to Bisbee, Arizona tonight, Friday, at the Bisbee Royale at 7:00. On Saturday, we&#8217;ll be in Tucson, Arizona , at 1:00, Fox Tucson Theatre, and in the evening in Phoenix . AMYGOODMAN: We’re on the road in Albuquerque, New Mexico, headed to Silver City, and then tonight we’ll be in Bisbee, Arizona, followed by tomorrow at 1:00 in [Tucson] and then tomorrow night in Phoenix.

But right now, with less than 24 days before the 2012 general election, the two vice-presidential candidates squared off in their only debate Thursday night, on the campus of Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. For about an hour and a half, the candidates aggressively challenged each other on foreign and domestic policy issues as they sat at a table with moderator Martha Raddatz of ABC News. Raddatz pressed them with questions on the deaths of Americans at the U.S. embassy in Libya, taxes, Medicare, Social Security, the budget deficit, terrorism and Afghanistan. She also asked each of the candidates, both of whom are Catholic, about how their personal beliefs affect their views on abortion.

Well, today, Democracy Now! brings you our second "Expanding the Debate" special. We first broke the sound barrier during the presidential debate in Denver by pausing after President Obama’s and Mitt Romney’s answers to get real-time responses from Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party, both of those parties’ presidential candidates. Well, today, we do the same, but this time with their running mates. Cheri Honkala, with the Green Party, she is the vice-presidential nominee in the 2012 election. She’s also national coordinator of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign. And Luis Rodriguez of the Justice Party is a noted Chicano writer and a gang expert and interventionist. His 15 published books include the bestselling 1993 memoir Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. and its 2011 sequel, It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing. He’s co-founder of the Network for Revolutionary Change.

Vice-presidential candidates Luis Rodriguez and Cheri Honkala, we welcome them into the debate, but we will go to them in a moment. First, we begin with the debate moderator, Martha Raddatz.

MARTHARADDATZ: ...the state of our economy. The number one issue here at home is jobs. The percentage of unemployed just fell below 8 percent for the first time in 43 months. The Obama administration had projected that it would fall below 6 percent now after the addition of close to a trillion dollars in stimulus money. So will both of you level with the American people? Can you get unemployment to under 6 percent, and how long will it take?

VICEPRESIDENTJOEBIDEN: I don’t know how long it will take.

MARTHARADDATZ: Vice President Biden.

VICEPRESIDENTJOEBIDEN: We can and we will get it under 6 percent.

Let’s look at the—let’s take a look at the facts. Let’s look at where we were when we came to office. The economy was in free fall. We had—the Great Recession hit. Nine million people lost their job, 1.7—$1.6 trillion in wealth lost in equity in your homes and retirement accounts from the middle class.

We knew we had to act for the middle class. We immediately went out and rescued General Motors. We went ahead and made sure that we cut taxes for the middle class. And in addition to that, when that—and when that occurred, what did Romney do? Romney said, "No, let Detroit go bankrupt." We moved in and helped people refinance their homes. Governor Romney said, "No, let foreclosures hit the bottom."

But it shouldn’t be surprising for a guy who says 47 percent of the American people are unwilling to take responsibility for their own lives. My friend recently, in a speech in Washington, said 30 percent of the American people are takers. These people are my mom and dad, the people I grew up with, my neighbors. They pay more effective tax than Governor Romney pays in his federal income tax. They are elderly people who in fact are living off of Social Security. They are veterans and people fighting in Afghanistan right now who are, quote, "not paying any taxes."

I’ve had it up to here with this notion that 47 percent—it’s about time they take some responsibility here. And instead of signing pledges to Grover Norquist not to ask the wealthiest among us to contribute to bring back the middle class, they should be signing a pledge saying to the middle class, "We’re going to level the playing field. We’re going to give you a fair shot again. We are going to not repeat the mistakes we made in the past by having a different set of rules for Wall Street and Main Street," making sure that we continue to hemorrhage these tax cuts for the super-wealthy.

They’re pushing the continuation of a tax cut that will give an additional $500 billion in tax cuts to 120,000 families. And they’re holding hostage the middle-class tax cut because they say, "We won’t pass—we won’t continue the middle-class tax cut unless you give the tax cut for the super-wealthy." It’s about time they take some responsibility.

MARTHARADDATZ: Mr. Ryan.

REP. PAULRYAN: Joe and I are from similar towns. He’s from Scranton, Pennsylvania; I’m from Janesville, Wisconsin. You know what the unemployment rate in Scranton is today?

VICEPRESIDENTJOEBIDEN: I sure do.

REP. PAULRYAN: It’s 10 percent.

VICEPRESIDENTJOEBIDEN: Yeah.

REP. PAULRYAN: You know what it was the day you guys came in? Eight-point-five percent.

VICEPRESIDENTJOEBIDEN: Yeah.

REP. PAULRYAN: That’s how it’s going all around America. Look—

VICEPRESIDENTJOEBIDEN: You don’t read the statistics.

REP. PAULRYAN: Look—

VICEPRESIDENTJOEBIDEN: That’s not how it’s going. It’s going down.

MARTHARADDATZ: This is his two-minute answer, please.

REP. PAULRYAN: Look, did they come in and inherit a tough situation? Absolutely. But we’re going in the wrong direction. Look at where we are. The economy is barely limping along. It’s growing at 1.3 percent. That’s slower than it grew last year, and last year was slower than the year before. Job growth in September was slower than it was in August, and August was slower than it was in July. We’re heading in the wrong direction.

Twenty-three million Americans are struggling for work today. Fifteen percent of Americans are living in poverty today. This is not what a real recovery looks like. We need real reforms for a real recovery, and that’s exactly what Mitt Romney and I are proposing. It’s a five-point plan: get America energy-independent in North America by the end of the decade; help people who are hurting get the skills they need to get the jobs they want; get this deficit and debt under control to prevent a debt crisis; make trade work for America so we can make more things in America and sell them overseas and champion small businesses; don’t raise taxes on small businesses, because they’re our job creators.

He talks about Detroit. Mitt Romney’s a car guy. They keep misquoting him, but let me tell you about the Mitt Romney I know. This is a guy who—I was talking to a family in Northborough, Massachusetts, the other day, Sheryl and Mark Nixon. Their kids were hit in a car crash, four of them—two of them, Rob and Reed, were paralyzed. The Romneys didn’t know them. They went to the same church. They never met before. Mitt asked if he could come over on Christmas. He brought his boys, his wife and gifts. Later on he said, "I know you’re struggling, Mark. Don’t worry about their college; I’ll pay for it."

When Mark told me this story—because you know what? Mitt Romney doesn’t tell these stories. The Nixons told this story. When he told me this story, he said it wasn’t the help, the cash help; it’s that he gave his time. And he has consistently. This is a man who gave 30 percent of his income to charity, more than the two of us combined. Mitt Romney’s a good man. He cares about a hundred percent of Americans in this country.

And with respect to that quote, I think the vice president very well knows that sometimes the words don’t come out of your mouth the right way.

VICEPRESIDENTJOEBIDEN: But I always say what I mean. And so does Romney.

REP. PAULRYAN: We want everybody to succeed. We want to get people out of poverty, in the middle class, on to lives of self-sufficiency. We believe in opportunity and upward mobility. That’s what we’re going to push for in a Romney administration.

AMYGOODMAN: Luis Rodriguez, you’re the vice-presidential nominee for the Justice Party. Can you get unemployment under 6 percent? And how? You have two minutes.

LUISRODRIGUEZ: One, you cannot do it relying on the old industrial basis of this country, because it’s gone. Technology has changed everything. The whole scenario has changed. Now you have what’s called the Wal-Marting of America, where people who do work are underemployed and cannot survive with those jobs—unrepresented, unorganized and low-paid.

So, what you have to do is think of a whole short range and long range. The short range would be, do what was supposed to be done. Get jobs to build our country—the infrastructure, the buildings. Get housing done by people. Give people the hammers and nails, and let them build this country from the bottom up. Give people the imagination, so they can get into the technology and utilize it to really have meaningful jobs.

In the long run, I do think it has to be structural changes. We have to restructure our economy so that everybody can work, everybody’s passions can be their profession, and we have a whole different way of looking at jobs than the way that’s constantly being done by both the Republicans and the Democrats.

CHERIHONKALA: Well, first of all, I just want to thank you, Amy, for having us on today and having this debate. What we would do is we would green the economy, making sure that we put jobs that would last for a long time, that would save our environment, and that would put people to work. We would also turn the unemployment centers into employment centers, and we would put homeless people to work renovating abandoned houses. We have more abandoned houses than we have homeless people in this country, and we could do something by putting them to work.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to turn back to Martha Raddatz, debate moderator, in Kentucky.

MARTHARADDATZ: Let’s talk about Medicare and entitlements. Both Medicare and Social Security are going broke and taking a larger share of the budget in the process. Will benefits for Americans under these programs have to change for the programs to survive, Mr. Ryan?

REP. PAULRYAN: Absolutely. Medicare and Social Security are going bankrupt. These are indisputable facts.

Look, when I look at these programs—we’ve all had tragedies in our lives—I think about what they’ve done for my own family. My mom and I had my grandmother move in with us who was facing Alzheimer’s. Medicare was there for her, just like it’s there for my mom right now, who’s a Florida senior. After my dad died, my mom and I got Social Security survivors benefits—helped me pay for college. It helped her go back to college in her fifties, where she started a small business because of the new skills she got. She paid all of her taxes, on the promise that these programs would be there for her. We will honor this promise.

And the best way to do it is reform it for my generation. You see, if you reform these programs for my generation, people 54 and below, you can guarantee they don’t change for people in or near retirement, which is precisely what Mitt Romney and I are proposing.

Look what—look what "Obamacare" does. "Obamacare" takes $716 billion from Medicare to spend on "Obamacare." Even their own chief actuary at Medicare backs this up. He says you can’t spend the same dollar twice. You can’t claim that this money goes to Medicare and "Obamacare." And then they put this new "Obamacare" board in charge of cutting Medicare each and every year in ways that will lead to denied care for current seniors. This board, by the way, it’s 15 people. The president’s supposed to appoint them next year. And not one of them even has to have medical training.

And Social Security? If we don’t shore up Social Security, when we run out of the IOUs, when the program goes bankrupt, a 25 percent across-the-board benefit cut kicks in on current seniors in the middle of their retirement. We’re going to stop that from happening.

They haven’t put a credible solution on the table. He’ll tell you about vouchers. He’ll say all these things to try and scare people.

Here’s what we’re saying: give younger people, when they become Medicare-eligible, guaranteed coverage options that you can’t be denied, including traditional Medicare. Choose your plan, and then Medicare subsidizes your premiums, not as much for the wealthy people, more coverage for middle-income people, and total out-of-pocket coverage for the poor and the sick. Choice and competition. We would rather have 50 million future seniors determine how their Medicare is delivered to them, instead of 15 bureaucrats deciding what, if, where, when they get it.

MARTHARADDATZ: Vice President Biden, two minutes.

VICEPRESIDENTJOEBIDEN: You know, I heard that death panel argument from Sarah Palin. It seems every vice-presidential debate, I hear this kind of stuff about panels. But let’s talk about Medicare.

What we did is we saved $716 billion and put it back, applied it to Medicare. We cut the cost of Medicare. We stopped overpaying insurance companies when doctors and hospitals—the AMA supported what we did. AARP endorsed what we did. And it extended the life of Medicare to 2024. They want to wipe this all out. It also gave more benefits. Any senior out there, ask yourself, do you have more benefits today? You do. If you’re near the donut hole, you have 800—$600 more to help your prescription drug costs. You get wellness visits without co-pays. They wipe all of this out, and Medicare goes—becomes insolvent in 2016, number one.

Number two, guaranteed benefit—it’s a voucher. When they first proposed—when the congressman had his first voucher program, the CBO said it would cost $6,400 a year, Martha, more for every senior 55 and below when they got there. He knew that, yet he gathered all the guys in Congress and women in the Republican Party to vote for it. Governor Romney, knowing that, said, "I—I would sign it, were I there." Who you believe? The AMA? Me? A guy who’s fought his whole life for this? Or somebody who had actually put in motion a plan that knowingly cut—added $6,400-a-year more to the cost of Medicare? Now they got a new plan. Trust me, it’s not going to cost you any more. Folks, follow your instincts on this one.

And with regard to Social Security, we will not—we will not privatize it. If we had listened to Romney, to Governor Romney and the congressman during the Bush years, imagine where all those seniors would be now if their money had been in the market. Their ideas are old, and their ideas are bad, and they eliminate the guarantee of Medicare.

AMYGOODMAN: Green Party vice-presidential nominee Cheri Honkala, your approach to Medicare, its problems, and what you’ll do about it?

CHERIHONKALA: First of all, we see healthcare as a basic human right. We see that everybody in America should have access to healthcare. We believe in the U.S. single-payer healthcare, and we want to have Medicare for all in this country. We have enough to go around, and everybody should be guaranteed an opportunity to be healthy, productive citizens.

AMYGOODMAN: Medicare for all, what does that mean?

CHERIHONKALA: It means that we want a single-payer system. We think that everybody should be covered, from rehabilitation, drug and alcohol programs, to operations, to their dental coverage covered. You name it, people should have quality healthcare in this country, and they should be guaranteed it, just like the Medicare system that we have. It should be expanded to cover everyone.

LUISRODRIGUEZ: Yeah, first of all, the whole medical system has to be taken out of the profit world, profit market, taken out of the market system. It’s an essential, as Cheri said. It’s something that everybody needs. We spend billions and billions of dollars wasting money, just because people aren’t being taken care of, the illnesses and the sicknesses they get at the back end because we don’t do enough to prevent, to help, to maintain, to give people the care they need.

And I think this is something that government should essentially have to do, because it’s got to be taken out of the hands of the insurance companies, out of the big hospitals. Healthcare cost, as you know, has gone astronomical. And then what we’re asking the government is, give me a little break, out of something that’s taken completely out of our hands. I think it does have to come back.

Single payer, as everybody has said, extend Medicare to everybody, not just to the elderly, but extend it to every kid, every adult, every youth. Make sure that everybody has access to the great technological innovations there are in medicine, but also just to understand, our bodies are our medicine. We don’t need to be given a lot of drugs. Pharmaceutical companies throw things in there. We can just need help in making own bodies heal, which requires good eating, good exercise, a sense of less stress, of living in a world that doesn’t demand too much of you, but making sure that the government ensures this as an essential need, not just something that somebody should be able to go to a market and try to profit off of it like is being done today.

AMYGOODMAN: We are expanding the debate, the only vice-presidential debate in this election season. We go to break and then come back. This is Democracy Now! This is what democracy sounds like.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: We are expanding the debate, the only vice-presidential debate that’s taking place this election season. We are joined by Luis Rodriguez, the vice-presidential nominee for the Justice Party, and Cheri Honkala, the vice-presidential nominee for the Green Party. In Kentucky, Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential nominee is there, Paul Ryan, as well as Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee. Martha Raddatz is the debate moderator in Kentucky.

MARTHARADDATZ: I want to know how you do the math and have this increase in defense spending.

REP. PAULRYAN: If these cuts go through, our Navy will be the small it has—the smallest it has been since before World War I. This invites weakness.

Look, do we believe in peace through strength? You bet we do. And that means you don’t impose these devastating cuts on our military. So we’re saying, don’t cut the military by a trillion dollars—not increase it by a trillion, don’t cut it by a trillion dollars.

MARTHARADDATZ: Quickly, Vice President Biden, on this, then I want to move on.

VICEPRESIDENTJOEBIDEN: Look, we don’t cut it. And I might add, this so-called—I know we don’t want to use the fancy word "sequester," this automatic cut, that was part of a debt deal that they asked for. And let me tell you what my friend said at a press conference announcing his support of the deal. He said—and I’m paraphrasing — "We’ve been looking for this moment for a long time.

MARTHARADDATZ: And I’d like to move on to Afghanistan, please.

REP. PAULRYAN: OK.

MARTHARADDATZ: Now, we’ve reached the recruiting goal for Afghan forces. We’ve degraded al-Qaeda. So tell me, why not leave now? What more can we really accomplish? Is it worth more American lives?

REP. PAULRYAN: We don’t want to lose the gains we’ve gotten. We want to make sure that the Taliban does not come back in and give al-Qaeda a safe haven. We agree with the administration on their 2014 transition.

Look, when I think about Afghanistan, I think about the incredible job that our troops have done. You’ve been there more than the two of us combined. First time I was there in 2002, it was amazing to me what they were facing. When I went to the Arghandab Valley in Kandahar before the surge, I sat down with a young private in the 82nd from the Menominee Indian Reservation, who would tell me what he did every day, and I was in awe. And to see what they had in front of them, and then to go back there in December to go throughout Helmand with the Marines to see what they had accomplished, it’s nothing short of amazing. What we don’t want to do is lose the gains we’ve gotten.

Now, we’ve disagreed from time to time on a few issues. We would have more likely taken into account the recommendations from our commanders—General Petraeus, Admiral Mullen—on troop levels throughout this year’s fighting season. We’ve been skeptical about negotiations with the Taliban, especially while they’re shooting at us. But we want to see the 2014 transition be successful. And that means we want to make sure our commanders have what they need to make sure that it is successful, so that this does not once again become a launching pad for terrorists.

MARTHARADDATZ: Vice President Biden.

VICEPRESIDENTJOEBIDEN: Martha, let’s keep our eye on the ball—the reason I’ve been in and out of Afghanistan and Iraq 20 times, I’ve been up in the Kunar Valley, I’ve been throughout that whole country, mostly in a helicopter and sometimes in a vehicle. The fact is, we went there for one reason: to get those people who killed Americans—al-Qaeda. We’ve decimated al-Qaeda central. We have eliminated Osama bin Laden. That was our purpose.

And, in fact, in the meantime, what we said we would do, we would help train the Afghan military. It’s their responsibility to take over their own security. That’s why, with 49 of our allies in Afghanistan, we’ve agreed on a gradual drawdown so we’re out of there by the year—in the year 2014.

My friend and the governor say it’s based on conditions, which means it depends. It does not depend for us. It is the responsibility of the Afghans to take care of their own security. We have trained over 315,000, mostly without incident. There have been more than two dozen cases of green-on-blue, where Americans have been killed. If we do not—if the—if the measures the military has taken do not take hold, we will not go on joint patrols, we will not train in the field. We’ll only train in the—in the Army bases that exist there.

But we are leaving. We are leaving in 2014, period. And in the process, we’re going to be saving, over the next 10 years, another $800 billion. We’ve been in this war for over a decade. The primary objective is almost completed. Now all we’re doing is putting the Kabul government in a position to be able to maintain their own security. It’s their responsibility, not America’s.

AMYGOODMAN: Justice Party vice-presidential nominee Luis Rodriguez, respond on the issue of defense spending, as well as Afghanistan.

LUISRODRIGUEZ: We have, unfortunately, an empire. The U.S. is behind this empire. We have the largest military force in the world. We have caused more damage, more destruction, more terrorism to happen than any other force in this world. I know this is hard to imagine anybody saying this, but I don’t need an intelligence mechanism to know that we have been behind so much war, so much destruction. It’s time for the American people to not have our soldiers, our mothers and brothers and sisters, out in the wars anymore in places that we don’t belong, in places that don’t resolve anything. In spite of the war against terror, I don’t feel any safer. Nobody feels any safer. I think this is about time that this empire were to end. It’s hurting our economy. It’s hurting our politics. We cannot survive as people in this world if we continually go around the world thinking that our issues, our demands and what we’re about is more important than anybody else in the world.

I am for making sure that this world is peaceful, which means you cannot have a military means of getting peace. You cannot have unmannned drones bombing civilians, no matter where it is in this world. So I do feel that we have to back off completely from the defense budget, which is the single-largest means that money is being taken away out of our economy, putting it back in military, put it back in defense industries that are making millions of dollars off our taxes and our sweat and blood.

AMYGOODMAN: Cheri Honkala, Green Party vice-presidential nominee, on the issue of defense and war spending in this country and Afghanistan?

CHERIHONKALA: We need to bring our troops home. We need to stop being the police force for the world. We need to stay out of other people’s business and their fight for democracy. And we need to take that money, and we need to bring it back home. We need to bring our soldiers back home, turn them into organic farmers, help—have them be busy rebuilding America. The answer is not with war. The answer is creating a better America for all of us to live in.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to go right now to closing statements. Martha Raddatz at the—in Kentucky.

MARTHARADDATZ: OK, we now turn to the candidates for their closing statements. Thank you, gentlemen. And that coin toss, again, has Vice President Biden starting with the closing statement.

VICEPRESIDENTJOEBIDEN: Well, let—let me say at the outset that I want to thank you, Martha, for doing this, and Centre College.

The fact is that we’re in a situation where we inherited a god-awful circumstance. People are in real trouble. We acted to move to bring relief to the people who need the most help now. And—and in the process, we—in case you haven’t noticed, we have strong disagreements. But I—you probably detected my frustration with their attitude about the American people. My friend says that 30 percent of the American people are takers. They—Romney points out, 47 percent of the people won’t take responsibility. He’s talking about my mother and father. He’s talking about the places I grew up in, my neighbors in Scranton and Claymont. He’s talking about—he’s talking about the people that have built this country. All they’re looking for, Martha—all they’re looking for is an even shot. When they’ve been given the shot, they’ve done it. They’ve done it. Whenever you’ve leveled the playing field, they’ve been able to move. And they want a little bit of peace of mind. And the president and I are not going to rest until that playing field is leveled, they in fact have a clear shot, and they have peace of mind, until they can turn to their kid and say with a degree of confidence, "Honey, it’s going to be OK. It’s going to be OK." That’s what this is all about.

MARTHARADDATZ: Congressman Ryan.

REP. PAULRYAN: I want to thank you, as well, Martha; Danville, Kentucky; Centre College. And I want to thank you, Joe. It’s been an honor to engage in this critical debate.

We face a very big choice. What kind of country are we going to be? What kind of country are we going to give our kids? President Obama, he had his chance. He made his choices. His economic agenda—more spending, more borrowing, higher taxes, a government takeover of healthcare—it’s not working. It’s failed to create the jobs we need. Twenty-three million Americans are struggling for work today. Fifteen percent of Americans are in poverty. This is not what a real recovery looks like. You deserve better.

Mitt Romney and I want to earn your support. We’re offering real reforms for a real recovery for every American. Mitt Romney—his experience, his ideas, his solutions—is uniquely qualified to get this job done. At a time when we have a jobs crisis in America, wouldn’t it be nice to have a job creator in the White House?

The choice is clear: a stagnant economy that promotes more government dependency, or a dynamic, growing economy that promotes opportunity and jobs. Mitt Romney and I will not duck the tough issues. And we will not blame others for the next four years. We will take responsibility. And we will not try to replace our founding principles; we will reapply our founding principles. The choice is clear, and the choice rests with you. And we ask you for your vote. Thank you.

AMYGOODMAN: Cheri Honkala, you have one minute for your final statement.

CHERIHONKALA: As a formerly homeless mother, I know your pains out there. We can have a country that can be free from unemployment, hunger and homelessness. Let’s occupy the voting booths on Election Day. Let’s vote Green and put two women in the White House, so that we can take back America and have another country and another world.

LUISRODRIGUEZ: Yeah, I think this is not about recovery, but a regeneration, of bringing back the idea, the imaginations, the power that we hold in our hands into the political process, into the economy. This country is vast. It’s got a lot of latent talent and attributes in our kids, in our working class, in people who build their homes and see their homes being taken away. This is a period of the worst corporate thievery that we’ve seen in our history, and nobody is putting them accountable. Let’s take it back and put it in our hands, in the hands of the people who work, in the hands of the people who can imagine, and regenerate our economy completely by making sure that everybody’s needs are met, everybody’s housing is taken care of, everybody’s medical needs, educational needs. No more corporation of the education, where kids are having $60,000 to $70,000 debt just to go to school, because they have to now, because they can’t survive without it. We have to re-imagine another America, another world, a clean, environmental—justice in our environment, justice in the economy, justice in our politics.

AMYGOODMAN: Luis Rodriguez, vice-presidential nominee for the Justice Party; Cheri Honkala, vice-presidential nominee for the Green Party, joining Paul Ryan of the Republican Party and Vice President Joe Biden of the Democratic Party in this only vice-presidential debate of the 2012 election. And that does it for our "Expanding the Debates" series until next week, when we’ll be broadcasting from Hofstra.

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Fri, 12 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0400Third Party Candidates Join in Real Time on Democracy Now!'s Live Coverage of Presidential Debatehttp://www.democracynow.org/blog/2012/9/28/third_party_candidates_to_join_in_real_time_on_democracy_now_s_live_coverage_of_first_pres_debate
tag:democracynow.org,2012-09-28:blog/b95705 As President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney square off in their first debate tonight, Democracy Now! will broadcast live from Denver with a special expanded presidential debate from 8:30 to 11:30 p.m. ET. We will air the Obama/Romney debate, pausing after questions to include equal time responses from two presidential contenders who were shut out of the official debate: Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party.
Stream our special 3-hour show on the Democracy Now! livestream or tune in on television on Link TV ( DISH Network Channel 9410 or DirecTV Channel 375) or on Free Speech TV ( DISH Network Channel 9415 or DirecTV Channel 348).
Click here to see all of our coverage of Election 2012.
Join the discussion on our Facebook page , on Google+ or on Twitter #ExpandTheDebate.
Watch our interview with Rocky Anderson , former mayor of Salt Lake City, when he announced his presidential campaign in December.
In July, Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman sat down with Dr. Jill Stein for an extended interview.
During an interview several weeks ago, Rocky Anderson discussed how the Democrats and Republicans were restricting third parties in U.S. politics.
As President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney square off in their first debate tonight, Democracy Now! will broadcast live from Denver with a special expanded presidential debate from 8:30 to 11:30 p.m. ET. We will air the Obama/Romney debate, pausing after questions to include equal time responses from two presidential contenders who were shut out of the official debate: Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party.

During an interview several weeks ago, Rocky Anderson discussed how the Democrats and Republicans were restricting third parties in U.S. politics.

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Fri, 28 Sep 2012 13:43:00 -0400Why Did the Dems Choose Charlotte? Examining Obama's Close Ties to Utility Giant Duke Energyhttp://www.democracynow.org/2012/9/4/why_did_the_dems_choose_charlotte
tag:democracynow.org,2012-09-04:en/story/89d8e5 AMY GOODMAN : We turn now to the nation&#8217;s largest utility, Duke Energy, and its role in bringing the Democratic National Convention to Charlotte, North Carolina, where we&#8217;re broadcasting from. The company&#8217;s chief executive, James Rogers, held fundraisers, donated his company&#8217;s office space, even guaranteed a $10 million loan to the convention committee. On Monday, Rogers appeared on CNN to praise President Obama&#8217;s record on energy issues.
JAMES ROGERS : Well, from an energy sector, we&#8217;re better off today than we were four years ago. Think about it. President Obama pursued all-of-the-above strategy. Are we better off in terms of efficiency? We see per-home usage of electricity declining. That&#8217;s a good thing. The second thing is, we&#8217;ve built—two license for new nuclear plants have been issued. We&#8217;ve got abundant supply of natural gas at low prices. And so, if you look at the various ways to generate electricity in this country, we&#8217;re better off today than we were four years ago.
AMY GOODMAN : Last year, Duke Energy acquired Progress Energy in a nearly $14 billion deal, creating the nation&#8217;s largest utility company. The joint company became the third-largest provider of nuclear power in the country. In the wake of the merger, Progress CEO Bill Johnson reportedly received an exit payment of more than $44 million, after working just eight hours as CEO before resigning. Analysts say the merger may have helped Duke expand its nuclear capacity in an attempt to build new reactors. Duke Energy has partly been successful in fighting off federal regulations, thanks to its ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC . The secretive, right-wing corporate bill mill connects conservative state lawmakers with lobbyists and corporate PR agents. Duke Energy has reportedly sponsored ALEC&#8217;s meetings and bankrolled its attacks on clean energy legislation.
For more, we&#8217;re joined by two guests. Monica Embrey is the North Carolina organizer for Greenpeace USA , and Beth Henry is a local activist here in Charlotte who is raising concerns about Duke Energy and its ties to the Democratic National Convention.
Beth Henry, let us start with you. Do you believe it&#8217;s—Duke Energy is the reason why the Democrats are holding this convention in Charlotte?
BETH HENRY : I don&#8217;t know. I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s fair to say that. I think Duke Energy is a big part of the reason. Certainly, Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, played a big role in helping attract the convention and in helping fund it.
AMY GOODMAN : Explain.
BETH HENRY : He&#8217;s co-chair of the host committee. And Duke—he&#8217;s given the maximum amounts that he personally can give. Duke, as you said, is providing free office space for the committee. There are many other ties, money ties. Duke&#8217;s many other executives have given money.
AMY GOODMAN : Explain what Duke does, the various forms of energy plants that it has.
BETH HENRY : So, Duke is a transnational corporation, but here in North Carolina Duke is a regulated utility that now, after the merger, provides electricity to most North Carolinians. And right now it does that overwhelmingly with coal and nuclear energy. And their plan is to continue using overwhelmingly coal and nuclear and some gas-fired plants.
AMY GOODMAN : You spoke in front of Duke Energy at the protest.
BETH HENRY : I did.
AMY GOODMAN : What did you say?
BETH HENRY : I said now that Duke is the nation&#8217;s largest utility, Duke should lead our country and the world to a rapid transition to clean, renewable electricity instead of fossil fuels and nuclear.
AMY GOODMAN : Monica Embrey, you also addressed the crowd in Frazier Park. Talk about your concerns.
MONICA EMBREY : As Duke Energy, as Beth just mentioned, is now the nation&#8217;s largest utility, operating across North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, it definitely has the responsibility to be leading the nation. Unfortunately, that&#8217;s not the leadership that we&#8217;re seeing with Duke Energy nor its CEO , Jim Rogers. Jim Rogers talks a lot about climate change. He talks a lot about promoting renewable energy sources. But we&#8217;ve actually yet to see that in action. Here in North Carolina, we have coal-fired power plants surrounding us. In Charlotte, we have four, which have pretty significant impacts on local communities&#8217; health as well as being the largest contributors to global climate change.
AMY GOODMAN : And if he speaks out on climate change, what exactly does he say?
MONICA EMBREY : CEO Jim Rogers has been quoted many times saying that he understands the issue, and it&#8217;s something that we need to be moving on as a nation. And I think we would love to actually see him enact that with a pretty dramatic shift away from dirty energy and dangerous nuclear, and instead real investments in wind and solar. For example, here in North Carolina, Duke Energy&#8217;s current 20-year plan is to have 3 percent renewable energy. That&#8217;s simply unacceptable for the crises that we&#8217;re currently facing.
AMY GOODMAN : What do you want to see happen?
MONICA EMBREY : We want to see Duke Energy transition and shut down all of its coal plants, end their contracts with mountaintop removal coal mining, which is an incredibly destructive process where mountains across Appalachia are literally blown up to bring that coal to state like North Carolina, and instead invest in wind and solar and energy efficiency.
AMY GOODMAN : And how involved is Duke Energy in mountaintop removal?
MONICA EMBREY : The majority of the coal burned right here in North Carolina comes from blown-up mountains in—across Appalachia.
AMY GOODMAN : President Obama&#8217;s links to nuclear energy—no president dared, for many presidents in the last four decades, to start rebuilding nuclear power plants, but President Obama has pushed forward on that. If you can talk about his home state company of Exelon and also talk about Duke Energy here, [Beth] Henry, in North Carolina.
BETH HENRY : So, Exelon is headquartered in Illinois, and it&#8217;s the biggest owner of nuclear plants currently. And one of—
AMY GOODMAN : And it&#8217;s been a major supporter of President Obama.
BETH HENRY : Oh, correct. One of his top fundraisers is on the board of Exelon. Both Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod have strong connections with Exelon. And the New York Times recently did a piece explaining the excellent access that Exelon and its executives have had to the White House. So, money buys access to our politicians. And my concern, since I&#8217;m so concerned about what Duke is doing here, is that all of Duke&#8217;s help to the DNC is—will give them an opportunity to influence our government in ways that will not solve the urgent problem of climate change quickly enough.
AMY GOODMAN : I think it would surprise many to hear about President Obama&#8217;s close ties to the nuclear industry, because so many of the different movements that elected him in 2008—among them, the environmental movement—many in that movement come out of the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s that ultimately led to the prevention of any nuclear power plant being built in this country for decades. Now the Vogtle plants are being built in Georgia by Southern Power. And what about here, what Duke is trying to do?
BETH HENRY : So, Duke wants to build two plants near here. They don&#8217;t have approval for them yet. But everyone pretty much agrees that nuclear power is now uneconomic. So the only place they&#8217;re even being proposed is in states like this, where we have a regulated utility and all the costs can be imposed on the rate payers. The actual utility building, the plant has none of the risk. So, that&#8217;s why here, Florida, South Carolina—only in the Southeast—where we have utilities commissions that are charged with regulating these utilities, do we even have new nuclear plants proposed. But, of course, those utilities commissions are appointed by the government, and, you know, huge sums flow into state government just like they do into the federal government.
AMY GOODMAN : You&#8217;re a North Carolinian, Beth Henry. Have you had interaction with the CEO , Jim Rogers?
BETH HENRY : I have. In fact, when I recently spoke at the shareholders&#8217; meeting and came to the microphone, he said, &quot;You again.&quot; I&#8217;m that worried about climate change and that determined to do what I can to influence Duke. I do think Mr. Rogers is doing his job, which is to try to make as much money as he can for his shareholders, but it just so happens that that is not in the best interest of the rest of the world.
AMY GOODMAN : Monica Embrey, Greenpeace has been protesting Jim Rogers&#8217; ties to the Democratic National Committee and the convention here in Charlotte.
MONICA EMBREY : Yeah, we have. We think it&#8217;s really important that corporations and our government have some serious separation. As Beth was just mentioning, making sure that major corporations don&#8217;t have the access to undermine the best interests of the people here is what we&#8217;re really focusing on. Duke Energy has had extremely close ties with ALEC , which is the American Legislative Exchange Council, a right-wing bill mill group responsible for passing bills such as S.B. 1070, the Arizona immigration law, Stand Your Ground, related to Trayvon Martin, but also does an incredible amount of work opposing climate change legislation, opposing renewable energy, and stopping regulations of coal-fired power plants. Here in Charlotte, Duke Energy contributed significantly this past May to help bring ALEC&#8217;s conference. And we, along with a coalition of folks, including Energy Action, Energy Action Coalition, the Center for Media Democracy, Common Cause and CREDO , as well as others, are calling on Duke Energy to drop their ties with ALEC before the end of the DNC .
AMY GOODMAN : Finally, this story of Bill Johnson, the CEO for a day, can either of you explain exactly what happened, how, after being CEO for a couple of hours, he was given $44—I think it&#8217;s .4—million in severance pay?
BETH HENRY : I heard him and—
AMY GOODMAN : Beth Henry.
BETH HENRY : —Mr. Rogers testify before our utilities commission about what happened, but they told different stories, so I&#8217;m not sure what really happened. But the Duke legacy share—directors said that they &quot;lost confidence&quot; in Mr. Johnson, who was supposed to be CEO of the new company. And basically, at the—right after the merger, they asked him to resign or told him he would be fired if he didn&#8217;t resign. So, then somehow that day he ended up with that package, which, to be fair, did include some stock options and stuff that he may have earned before, but it was still a lot of money for someone who never actually became CEO .
AMY GOODMAN : Monica, what are your plans for the rest of this convention here in Charlotte?
MONICA EMBREY : Oh, we&#8217;re definitely going to be continuing to engage with the local community and folks in from out of town to call on Duke Energy to dump ALEC before the end of this convention.
AMY GOODMAN : And your plans, Beth?
BETH HENRY : I plan to help out with various activities the rest of the week and keep trying to push Duke to implement, right here in its home state, real solutions to climate change.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to thank you both for being with us, Monica Embrey of Greenpeace here in North Carolina and Beth Henry, who is a longtime North Carolinian taking on Duke Energy. This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . We&#8217;re &quot;Breaking With Convention.&quot; When we come back, we look at the bus that has carried scores of undocumented immigrants. Their slogan: &quot;No Papers, No Fear.&quot; Stay with us. AMYGOODMAN: We turn now to the nation’s largest utility, Duke Energy, and its role in bringing the Democratic National Convention to Charlotte, North Carolina, where we’re broadcasting from. The company’s chief executive, James Rogers, held fundraisers, donated his company’s office space, even guaranteed a $10 million loan to the convention committee. On Monday, Rogers appeared on CNN to praise President Obama’s record on energy issues.

JAMESROGERS: Well, from an energy sector, we’re better off today than we were four years ago. Think about it. President Obama pursued all-of-the-above strategy. Are we better off in terms of efficiency? We see per-home usage of electricity declining. That’s a good thing. The second thing is, we’ve built—two license for new nuclear plants have been issued. We’ve got abundant supply of natural gas at low prices. And so, if you look at the various ways to generate electricity in this country, we’re better off today than we were four years ago.

AMYGOODMAN: Last year, Duke Energy acquired Progress Energy in a nearly $14 billion deal, creating the nation’s largest utility company. The joint company became the third-largest provider of nuclear power in the country. In the wake of the merger, Progress CEO Bill Johnson reportedly received an exit payment of more than $44 million, after working just eight hours as CEO before resigning. Analysts say the merger may have helped Duke expand its nuclear capacity in an attempt to build new reactors. Duke Energy has partly been successful in fighting off federal regulations, thanks to its ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. The secretive, right-wing corporate bill mill connects conservative state lawmakers with lobbyists and corporate PR agents. Duke Energy has reportedly sponsored ALEC’s meetings and bankrolled its attacks on clean energy legislation.

For more, we’re joined by two guests. Monica Embrey is the North Carolina organizer for Greenpeace USA, and Beth Henry is a local activist here in Charlotte who is raising concerns about Duke Energy and its ties to the Democratic National Convention.

Beth Henry, let us start with you. Do you believe it’s—Duke Energy is the reason why the Democrats are holding this convention in Charlotte?

BETHHENRY: I don’t know. I don’t think it’s fair to say that. I think Duke Energy is a big part of the reason. Certainly, Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, played a big role in helping attract the convention and in helping fund it.

AMYGOODMAN: Explain.

BETHHENRY: He’s co-chair of the host committee. And Duke—he’s given the maximum amounts that he personally can give. Duke, as you said, is providing free office space for the committee. There are many other ties, money ties. Duke’s many other executives have given money.

AMYGOODMAN: Explain what Duke does, the various forms of energy plants that it has.

BETHHENRY: So, Duke is a transnational corporation, but here in North Carolina Duke is a regulated utility that now, after the merger, provides electricity to most North Carolinians. And right now it does that overwhelmingly with coal and nuclear energy. And their plan is to continue using overwhelmingly coal and nuclear and some gas-fired plants.

AMYGOODMAN: You spoke in front of Duke Energy at the protest.

BETHHENRY: I did.

AMYGOODMAN: What did you say?

BETHHENRY: I said now that Duke is the nation’s largest utility, Duke should lead our country and the world to a rapid transition to clean, renewable electricity instead of fossil fuels and nuclear.

AMYGOODMAN: Monica Embrey, you also addressed the crowd in Frazier Park. Talk about your concerns.

MONICAEMBREY: As Duke Energy, as Beth just mentioned, is now the nation’s largest utility, operating across North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, it definitely has the responsibility to be leading the nation. Unfortunately, that’s not the leadership that we’re seeing with Duke Energy nor its CEO, Jim Rogers. Jim Rogers talks a lot about climate change. He talks a lot about promoting renewable energy sources. But we’ve actually yet to see that in action. Here in North Carolina, we have coal-fired power plants surrounding us. In Charlotte, we have four, which have pretty significant impacts on local communities’ health as well as being the largest contributors to global climate change.

AMYGOODMAN: And if he speaks out on climate change, what exactly does he say?

MONICAEMBREY:CEO Jim Rogers has been quoted many times saying that he understands the issue, and it’s something that we need to be moving on as a nation. And I think we would love to actually see him enact that with a pretty dramatic shift away from dirty energy and dangerous nuclear, and instead real investments in wind and solar. For example, here in North Carolina, Duke Energy’s current 20-year plan is to have 3 percent renewable energy. That’s simply unacceptable for the crises that we’re currently facing.

AMYGOODMAN: What do you want to see happen?

MONICAEMBREY: We want to see Duke Energy transition and shut down all of its coal plants, end their contracts with mountaintop removal coal mining, which is an incredibly destructive process where mountains across Appalachia are literally blown up to bring that coal to state like North Carolina, and instead invest in wind and solar and energy efficiency.

AMYGOODMAN: And how involved is Duke Energy in mountaintop removal?

MONICAEMBREY: The majority of the coal burned right here in North Carolina comes from blown-up mountains in—across Appalachia.

AMYGOODMAN: President Obama’s links to nuclear energy—no president dared, for many presidents in the last four decades, to start rebuilding nuclear power plants, but President Obama has pushed forward on that. If you can talk about his home state company of Exelon and also talk about Duke Energy here, [Beth] Henry, in North Carolina.

BETHHENRY: So, Exelon is headquartered in Illinois, and it’s the biggest owner of nuclear plants currently. And one of—

AMYGOODMAN: And it’s been a major supporter of President Obama.

BETHHENRY: Oh, correct. One of his top fundraisers is on the board of Exelon. Both Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod have strong connections with Exelon. And the New York Times recently did a piece explaining the excellent access that Exelon and its executives have had to the White House. So, money buys access to our politicians. And my concern, since I’m so concerned about what Duke is doing here, is that all of Duke’s help to the DNC is—will give them an opportunity to influence our government in ways that will not solve the urgent problem of climate change quickly enough.

AMYGOODMAN: I think it would surprise many to hear about President Obama’s close ties to the nuclear industry, because so many of the different movements that elected him in 2008—among them, the environmental movement—many in that movement come out of the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s that ultimately led to the prevention of any nuclear power plant being built in this country for decades. Now the Vogtle plants are being built in Georgia by Southern Power. And what about here, what Duke is trying to do?

BETHHENRY: So, Duke wants to build two plants near here. They don’t have approval for them yet. But everyone pretty much agrees that nuclear power is now uneconomic. So the only place they’re even being proposed is in states like this, where we have a regulated utility and all the costs can be imposed on the rate payers. The actual utility building, the plant has none of the risk. So, that’s why here, Florida, South Carolina—only in the Southeast—where we have utilities commissions that are charged with regulating these utilities, do we even have new nuclear plants proposed. But, of course, those utilities commissions are appointed by the government, and, you know, huge sums flow into state government just like they do into the federal government.

AMYGOODMAN: You’re a North Carolinian, Beth Henry. Have you had interaction with the CEO, Jim Rogers?

BETHHENRY: I have. In fact, when I recently spoke at the shareholders’ meeting and came to the microphone, he said, "You again." I’m that worried about climate change and that determined to do what I can to influence Duke. I do think Mr. Rogers is doing his job, which is to try to make as much money as he can for his shareholders, but it just so happens that that is not in the best interest of the rest of the world.

AMYGOODMAN: Monica Embrey, Greenpeace has been protesting Jim Rogers’ ties to the Democratic National Committee and the convention here in Charlotte.

MONICAEMBREY: Yeah, we have. We think it’s really important that corporations and our government have some serious separation. As Beth was just mentioning, making sure that major corporations don’t have the access to undermine the best interests of the people here is what we’re really focusing on. Duke Energy has had extremely close ties with ALEC, which is the American Legislative Exchange Council, a right-wing bill mill group responsible for passing bills such as S.B. 1070, the Arizona immigration law, Stand Your Ground, related to Trayvon Martin, but also does an incredible amount of work opposing climate change legislation, opposing renewable energy, and stopping regulations of coal-fired power plants. Here in Charlotte, Duke Energy contributed significantly this past May to help bring ALEC’s conference. And we, along with a coalition of folks, including Energy Action, Energy Action Coalition, the Center for Media Democracy, Common Cause and CREDO, as well as others, are calling on Duke Energy to drop their ties with ALEC before the end of the DNC.

AMYGOODMAN: Finally, this story of Bill Johnson, the CEO for a day, can either of you explain exactly what happened, how, after being CEO for a couple of hours, he was given $44—I think it’s .4—million in severance pay?

BETHHENRY: I heard him and—

AMYGOODMAN: Beth Henry.

BETHHENRY: —Mr. Rogers testify before our utilities commission about what happened, but they told different stories, so I’m not sure what really happened. But the Duke legacy share—directors said that they "lost confidence" in Mr. Johnson, who was supposed to be CEO of the new company. And basically, at the—right after the merger, they asked him to resign or told him he would be fired if he didn’t resign. So, then somehow that day he ended up with that package, which, to be fair, did include some stock options and stuff that he may have earned before, but it was still a lot of money for someone who never actually became CEO.

AMYGOODMAN: Monica, what are your plans for the rest of this convention here in Charlotte?

MONICAEMBREY: Oh, we’re definitely going to be continuing to engage with the local community and folks in from out of town to call on Duke Energy to dump ALEC before the end of this convention.

AMYGOODMAN: And your plans, Beth?

BETHHENRY: I plan to help out with various activities the rest of the week and keep trying to push Duke to implement, right here in its home state, real solutions to climate change.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us, Monica Embrey of Greenpeace here in North Carolina and Beth Henry, who is a longtime North Carolinian taking on Duke Energy. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We’re "Breaking With Convention." When we come back, we look at the bus that has carried scores of undocumented immigrants. Their slogan: "No Papers, No Fear." Stay with us.

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Tue, 04 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0400No Papers, No Fear: Busload of Undocumented Immigrants Defy Risks to Bring Message to DNChttp://www.democracynow.org/2012/9/4/no_papers_no_fear_busload_of
tag:democracynow.org,2012-09-04:en/story/6ff556 AMY GOODMAN : Music from the protests here at the Democratic National Convention just before it began on Sunday. About 1,500 people marched here in Charlotte, North Carolina. This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, &quot;Breaking With Convention: War, Peace and the Presidency.&quot; We&#8217;re covering the Democratic National Convention, as we did the Republican convention, inside and out. I&#8217;m Amy Goodman.
Today delegates are set to officially adopt the Democrats&#8217; 2012 platform, which states they&#8217;re, quote, &quot;strongly committed to enacting comprehensive immigration reform.&quot; The overhaul would include requiring undocumented immigrants to, quote, &quot;get right with the law, learn English and pay taxes,&quot; in order to get on a path toward citizenship.
Meanwhile, a busload of more than 40 undocumented immigrants and their supporters, known as the UndocuBus, has arrived here in Charlotte after traveling more than 2,000 miles through 11 states to deliver a message to President Obama. This is bus rider Gabriela Alcazar.
GABRIELA ALCAZAR : Message to him is to stop the criminalization of our people. He came in as a president that was not only going to fight for immigration reform, but that was with our people. And it turns out he&#8217;s deported way more people than even Bush in his whole entire term. So, he has the power. We saw, with the deferred action for DREAMers, he has the power to make changes, and we&#8217;re here to demand that he do that. We&#8217;re not here saying that we&#8217;re not going to vote for him or that we&#8217;re going to vote for Mitt Romney. The Republicans have already chosen a side. We know where they stand. And we want the Democrats to do—to pick a side. What side of history are they going to be on?
AMY GOODMAN : UndocuBus rider Gabriela Alcazar. Her fellow undocumented riders range in age from 18 to 65. Their slogan: &quot;No Papers, No Fear.&quot; In many of the 15 cities they visited on their way to Charlotte, they engaged in civil disobedience to protest their criminalization by state and federal immigration laws.
Well, for more, we&#8217;re joined by two of the riders on the bus. Leticia Ramirez got on the bus in Phoenix, Arizona, where she&#8217;s a member of the Puente Human Rights Movement. The day before, she and three fellow undocumented immigrants were arrested outside the trial of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, known for his raids on Latino communities. Leticia came to the United States with her family when she was nine years old, now has three U.S. citizen children. We&#8217;re also joined by another bus rider, Rosi Carrasco. Originally from Mexico, she has lived in Chicago for the past 18 years, came as an undocumented immigrant after her daughters did so first. They&#8217;re also on the bus.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now!
LETICIA RAMIREZ : Thank you.
ROSI CARRASCO : Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN : Let us start with Leticia. Talk about the UndocuBus and what you&#8217;re trying to do here.
LETICIA RAMIREZ : What we&#8217;re trying to do is to teach the community how to defend themselves against all these laws that are trying to attack the community and trying to attack the Latino community. We know and we have known a lot of families have been deported because of these laws, that they&#8217;re trying to tell us that we are criminals. And that&#8217;s what we want to tell the Democrats, that we are not criminals. We&#8217;re just human beings that just want to come and work. We want to support the state and then have a decent life. And—
AMY GOODMAN : What happened the day before you got on the bus in Phoenix?
LETICIA RAMIREZ : It was Arpaio&#8217;s trial. We sat on the street. We told Arpaio that we were undocumented and unafraid. That was the first time that I came out of the shadows, because I think it was—it was time for me to tell the world that I&#8217;m not afraid anymore, that I want to defend my community, and I&#8217;m proud to be undocumented. I&#8217;m not ashamed, because that&#8217;s what we need, to the community be together and to have that unity.
AMY GOODMAN : How exactly did you come out? How exactly did you come out as an undocumented immigrant?
LETICIA RAMIREZ : We sat on the street, and then we got arrested for civil disobedience on the—on July 24th. We got arrested. When we went to Arpaio&#8217;s jail, we definitely told them that we were undocumented. And we proved that what he says, that we are not criminals—we proved to him that we are not criminals, because if we were criminals, how come they let us out?
AMY GOODMAN : Were you concerned, if you were arrested, you would be deported? Where is your family originally from?
LETICIA RAMIREZ : From Torreón, Coahuila.
AMY GOODMAN : And were you concerned you would be deported?
LETICIA RAMIREZ : I wasn&#8217;t concerned, because I know that I have my community that was supporting me. I have a lot of people that were giving me—what do call it—hope that they were going to help me in case if something happens. And the thing that we&#8217;re doing in Arizona is that we are—we know our rights. That&#8217;s what I&#8217;ve been in this movement for three years, and that&#8217;s why I wanted the community to know. If you know your rights, you know English, that&#8217;s more hope that you won&#8217;t get deported, if you have—like I have three kids, and I&#8217;ve been here for—I&#8217;ve been here—I&#8217;ve been living in Arizona for 18 years.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to turn to Governor Romney. During the Republican primary debate in January, he was asked, if he would not deport immigrants, how would he send them home? This was Mitt Romney&#8217;s response.
MITT ROMNEY : The answer is self-deportation, which is people decide that they can do better by going home because they can&#8217;t find work here, because they don&#8217;t have legal documentation to allow them to work here. And so, we&#8217;re not going to round people up. The way that we have in this society is to say, look, people who have come here illegally would, under my plan, be given a transition period and the opportunity during that transition period to work here, but when that transition period was over, they would no longer have the documentation to allow them to work in this country. At that point, they can decide whether to remain or whether to return home and to apply for legal residency in the United States, get in line with everybody else.
AMY GOODMAN : That&#8217;s Mitt Romney. Rosi, can you respond to Mitt Romney talking about self-deportation?
ROSI CARRASCO : You know, we know that Mitt Romney and the Republicans already took the decision about immigration, and that&#8217;s why we are here now with the Democrats. We know that we have been traveling for six weeks out there in the country, and we have encountered families that are suffering these policies of deportation. And since we know that the Republicans already have decided what to do, that&#8217;s why we have decided to come here and to bring our message to President Obama. I think that they are the ones that have to decide which side of the history they are going to be. So, for us, it&#8217;s important to bring the message to President Obama.
AMY GOODMAN : Talk about, Rosi, what the action is you&#8217;re planning to do today.
ROSI CARRASCO : Well, you know, two years ago, the undocumented youth started these actions called &quot;coming out of the shadows.&quot; And they decided that they will no longer be afraid, and they will say publicly that they are undocumented. Two years ago, my daughters were part of this movement, and they—my two daughters have been part of the civil disobedience actions. And I have learned from them that it&#8217;s important to be organized. Because of that, I think that it&#8217;s time for us, as parents and as community members, to do this, to follow their example. I know that there&#8217;s changes in the immigration policy because of the courage of these youth. And we are traveling together, youth and parents, workers. We are traveling together because we know that the only way to continuing pushing for change is working together, telling people that we are no longer afraid, that we are organized, and that we will continuing organize ourselves.
AMY GOODMAN : And so, this action that you&#8217;re going to do today?
ROSI CARRASCO : Well, today, we have decided to do an action because—because we found families that are in deportation procedures, because we have been doing everything we can. We march. We have been doing lobbying. We have been talking to politicians. And now we realize that we have to put ourselves in the line. So we have taken the decisions that we will be part of an action, a peaceful civil disobedience action at the doors of the Democratic National Convention. And what we want to say to the President Obama is, which side of the history he&#8217;s going to be? Is he going to be remembered as the president that has been deporting most people in the U.S. history, or he is going to be on the side of immigrants, respecting our right to organize ourselves? You know, we know that if we are detained by the sheriff, it&#8217;s up to the sheriff to turn us in to immigration. And it will be up to the immigration to start the deportation proceedings. But we wouldn&#8217;t be in this line, if not for the policies of immigration. So, for us, that&#8217;s important.
AMY GOODMAN : Leticia, as we wrap up, I hear Sheriff Arpaio may be in Charlotte on Wednesday. What are your thoughts about that? And why weren&#8217;t you protesting in Tampa, as well?
LETICIA RAMIREZ : Because I think that it&#8217;s important to be here in Charlotte with the Democrats, because, like Rosi said, we want Obama to decide on what side is he in, because if he did something for the students, the community is waiting for him to do something for the community. A lot of families have been separated because of the deportation that he&#8217;s been doing. So we want him to decide if he wants to be with the community or he wants to be deporting more people every day. And if Arpaio comes here, we&#8217;ll have to do something about it. And Arpaio knows that the community in Arizona is not going to—is not going to stop its fight against him, and we&#8217;re going to continue fighting until he&#8217;s out of the sheriff&#8217;s office.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, I want to thank you both so much for being with us. Leticia Ramirez and Rosi, thank you so much. &quot;No Papers, No Fear&quot; tour is the tour that they have been on. That does it for our broadcast. If you&#8217;d like to check both hours of our two-hour daily broadcast, &quot;Breaking With Convention,&quot; go to our website at democracynow.org. Rosi Carrasco, thanks so much, as well.
ROSI CARRASCO : Thank you. AMYGOODMAN: Music from the protests here at the Democratic National Convention just before it began on Sunday. About 1,500 people marched here in Charlotte, North Carolina. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, "Breaking With Convention: War, Peace and the Presidency." We’re covering the Democratic National Convention, as we did the Republican convention, inside and out. I’m Amy Goodman.

Today delegates are set to officially adopt the Democrats’ 2012 platform, which states they’re, quote, "strongly committed to enacting comprehensive immigration reform." The overhaul would include requiring undocumented immigrants to, quote, "get right with the law, learn English and pay taxes," in order to get on a path toward citizenship.

Meanwhile, a busload of more than 40 undocumented immigrants and their supporters, known as the UndocuBus, has arrived here in Charlotte after traveling more than 2,000 miles through 11 states to deliver a message to President Obama. This is bus rider Gabriela Alcazar.

GABRIELAALCAZAR: Message to him is to stop the criminalization of our people. He came in as a president that was not only going to fight for immigration reform, but that was with our people. And it turns out he’s deported way more people than even Bush in his whole entire term. So, he has the power. We saw, with the deferred action for DREAMers, he has the power to make changes, and we’re here to demand that he do that. We’re not here saying that we’re not going to vote for him or that we’re going to vote for Mitt Romney. The Republicans have already chosen a side. We know where they stand. And we want the Democrats to do—to pick a side. What side of history are they going to be on?

AMYGOODMAN: UndocuBus rider Gabriela Alcazar. Her fellow undocumented riders range in age from 18 to 65. Their slogan: "No Papers, No Fear." In many of the 15 cities they visited on their way to Charlotte, they engaged in civil disobedience to protest their criminalization by state and federal immigration laws.

Well, for more, we’re joined by two of the riders on the bus. Leticia Ramirez got on the bus in Phoenix, Arizona, where she’s a member of the Puente Human Rights Movement. The day before, she and three fellow undocumented immigrants were arrested outside the trial of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, known for his raids on Latino communities. Leticia came to the United States with her family when she was nine years old, now has three U.S. citizen children. We’re also joined by another bus rider, Rosi Carrasco. Originally from Mexico, she has lived in Chicago for the past 18 years, came as an undocumented immigrant after her daughters did so first. They’re also on the bus.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now!

LETICIARAMIREZ: Thank you.

ROSICARRASCO: Thank you.

AMYGOODMAN: Let us start with Leticia. Talk about the UndocuBus and what you’re trying to do here.

LETICIARAMIREZ: What we’re trying to do is to teach the community how to defend themselves against all these laws that are trying to attack the community and trying to attack the Latino community. We know and we have known a lot of families have been deported because of these laws, that they’re trying to tell us that we are criminals. And that’s what we want to tell the Democrats, that we are not criminals. We’re just human beings that just want to come and work. We want to support the state and then have a decent life. And—

AMYGOODMAN: What happened the day before you got on the bus in Phoenix?

LETICIARAMIREZ: It was Arpaio’s trial. We sat on the street. We told Arpaio that we were undocumented and unafraid. That was the first time that I came out of the shadows, because I think it was—it was time for me to tell the world that I’m not afraid anymore, that I want to defend my community, and I’m proud to be undocumented. I’m not ashamed, because that’s what we need, to the community be together and to have that unity.

AMYGOODMAN: How exactly did you come out? How exactly did you come out as an undocumented immigrant?

LETICIARAMIREZ: We sat on the street, and then we got arrested for civil disobedience on the—on July 24th. We got arrested. When we went to Arpaio’s jail, we definitely told them that we were undocumented. And we proved that what he says, that we are not criminals—we proved to him that we are not criminals, because if we were criminals, how come they let us out?

AMYGOODMAN: Were you concerned, if you were arrested, you would be deported? Where is your family originally from?

LETICIARAMIREZ: From Torreón, Coahuila.

AMYGOODMAN: And were you concerned you would be deported?

LETICIARAMIREZ: I wasn’t concerned, because I know that I have my community that was supporting me. I have a lot of people that were giving me—what do call it—hope that they were going to help me in case if something happens. And the thing that we’re doing in Arizona is that we are—we know our rights. That’s what I’ve been in this movement for three years, and that’s why I wanted the community to know. If you know your rights, you know English, that’s more hope that you won’t get deported, if you have—like I have three kids, and I’ve been here for—I’ve been here—I’ve been living in Arizona for 18 years.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to turn to Governor Romney. During the Republican primary debate in January, he was asked, if he would not deport immigrants, how would he send them home? This was Mitt Romney’s response.

MITTROMNEY: The answer is self-deportation, which is people decide that they can do better by going home because they can’t find work here, because they don’t have legal documentation to allow them to work here. And so, we’re not going to round people up. The way that we have in this society is to say, look, people who have come here illegally would, under my plan, be given a transition period and the opportunity during that transition period to work here, but when that transition period was over, they would no longer have the documentation to allow them to work in this country. At that point, they can decide whether to remain or whether to return home and to apply for legal residency in the United States, get in line with everybody else.

ROSICARRASCO: You know, we know that Mitt Romney and the Republicans already took the decision about immigration, and that’s why we are here now with the Democrats. We know that we have been traveling for six weeks out there in the country, and we have encountered families that are suffering these policies of deportation. And since we know that the Republicans already have decided what to do, that’s why we have decided to come here and to bring our message to President Obama. I think that they are the ones that have to decide which side of the history they are going to be. So, for us, it’s important to bring the message to President Obama.

AMYGOODMAN: Talk about, Rosi, what the action is you’re planning to do today.

ROSICARRASCO: Well, you know, two years ago, the undocumented youth started these actions called "coming out of the shadows." And they decided that they will no longer be afraid, and they will say publicly that they are undocumented. Two years ago, my daughters were part of this movement, and they—my two daughters have been part of the civil disobedience actions. And I have learned from them that it’s important to be organized. Because of that, I think that it’s time for us, as parents and as community members, to do this, to follow their example. I know that there’s changes in the immigration policy because of the courage of these youth. And we are traveling together, youth and parents, workers. We are traveling together because we know that the only way to continuing pushing for change is working together, telling people that we are no longer afraid, that we are organized, and that we will continuing organize ourselves.

AMYGOODMAN: And so, this action that you’re going to do today?

ROSICARRASCO: Well, today, we have decided to do an action because—because we found families that are in deportation procedures, because we have been doing everything we can. We march. We have been doing lobbying. We have been talking to politicians. And now we realize that we have to put ourselves in the line. So we have taken the decisions that we will be part of an action, a peaceful civil disobedience action at the doors of the Democratic National Convention. And what we want to say to the President Obama is, which side of the history he’s going to be? Is he going to be remembered as the president that has been deporting most people in the U.S. history, or he is going to be on the side of immigrants, respecting our right to organize ourselves? You know, we know that if we are detained by the sheriff, it’s up to the sheriff to turn us in to immigration. And it will be up to the immigration to start the deportation proceedings. But we wouldn’t be in this line, if not for the policies of immigration. So, for us, that’s important.

AMYGOODMAN: Leticia, as we wrap up, I hear Sheriff Arpaio may be in Charlotte on Wednesday. What are your thoughts about that? And why weren’t you protesting in Tampa, as well?

LETICIARAMIREZ: Because I think that it’s important to be here in Charlotte with the Democrats, because, like Rosi said, we want Obama to decide on what side is he in, because if he did something for the students, the community is waiting for him to do something for the community. A lot of families have been separated because of the deportation that he’s been doing. So we want him to decide if he wants to be with the community or he wants to be deporting more people every day. And if Arpaio comes here, we’ll have to do something about it. And Arpaio knows that the community in Arizona is not going to—is not going to stop its fight against him, and we’re going to continue fighting until he’s out of the sheriff’s office.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both so much for being with us. Leticia Ramirez and Rosi, thank you so much. "No Papers, No Fear" tour is the tour that they have been on. That does it for our broadcast. If you’d like to check both hours of our two-hour daily broadcast, "Breaking With Convention," go to our website at democracynow.org. Rosi Carrasco, thanks so much, as well.

ROSICARRASCO: Thank you.

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Tue, 04 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0400Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Progressive Mainstay in Congress, Loses Dem. Primary in Redrawn Ohio Districthttp://www.democracynow.org/2012/3/7/rep_dennis_kucinich_progressive_mainstay_in
tag:democracynow.org,2012-03-07:en/story/db8720 AMY GOODMAN : I wanted to turn to another of the races that hasn&#8217;t got as much attention. But this is Dennis Kucinich, the race between Dennis Kucinich and Marcy Kaptur in a redrawn district in Ohio. The significance of Marcy Kaptur&#8217;s victory? And now she&#8217;s going to be up against the man who won the Republican primary, the man who most of America knows as &quot;Joe the Plumber.&quot; John Nichols?
JOHN NICHOLS : Sure. It&#8217;s an overwhelmingly Democratic district, so at the end of the day the likelihood is that whoever won this primary was going to go on to win. And I think Marcy Kaptur will beat Joe the Plumber, probably with relative ease. But the primary contest was in many ways a heartbreaking one, because you have very few people in Congress who are willing to stand up and say bold things on core economic issues and on issues of war and peace. And so, what Republican remapping folks, the redistricting commission in Ohio, did was jam together two very Democratic districts and take two of the more, I&#8217;d say, independent and outspoken Democrats in the Congress, put them together in the same seat, and force them to fight it out. Kaptur won not because Dennis Kucinich is a bad guy or somehow the people turned against him, but because the district at least marginally favored her. It was more of her turf than Dennis Kucinich&#8217;s turf. But it was a—it was a rough primary. They fought with each other very hard.
At the end of the day, however, I think we ought to reflect, at least for a moment, on the real loss for Congress. Losing either of these members would have been serious. Kaptur was, of course, the person who in Michael Moore&#8217;s Capitalism: A Love Story referred to the bank bailouts as an economic coup d&#8217;état. She&#8217;s been an incredibly outspoken critic of big banks and Wall Street. Losing her would have been a bad thing. But losing Dennis Kucinich, I think, is a real tragedy for Congress. This is—
AMY GOODMAN : I guess—
JOHN NICHOLS : Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : —the question is, will he be lost?
JOHN NICHOLS : Ah.
AMY GOODMAN : When I was in Seattle last May, in Washington—
JOHN NICHOLS : Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : —I actually bumped into Congress Member Kucinich and talked to him about why he was there in the state of Washington.
REP . DENNIS KUCINICH : Ohio has a redistricting. Ohio is losing two seats. My district is quite likely to be one of them. So people have asked me, &quot;Well, if the Republicans redistrict you, are you just going to quit?&quot; And I said, &quot;Look, I&#8217;m in Congress to speak out for workers&#8217; rights, for human rights, for peace, for the environment. And so, I&#8217;d like to continue that work, and if I can&#8217;t continue it in the area that I&#8217;m representing now, then I&#8217;m going to look elsewhere.&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : And so, the question is whether Congress Member Kucinich would establish residency in Washington state, although wouldn&#8217;t that be difficult, as he still represents the people of Cleveland in Congress, John Nichols?
JOHN NICHOLS : Yes, he would have to step down to change his residency, if I understand it correctly. But he does have time to do it. The Washington state primary is very, very late. And so, the filing deadline for running in this new seat in Washington state in the Seattle area is not until June. And so, Senator—or Congressman Kucinich could make this move.
It&#8217;s very, very hard, having run for a seat in one state, to then jump to another state and say you want to make a try there. This is much more of a European model. In England, for instance, something like that might happen quite commonly, because under their parliamentary system, members often represent areas that they&#8217;re not from. In America, we have much more of a tradition of sort of locally rooted candidates. And so, I think it would be a very tough jump.
By the same token, as I was saying before, I think losing Dennis Kucinich, with his outspoken antiwar stances and also his sort of rapid response on so many issues—he&#8217;s usually the quickest member to be up and running with a progressive response to economic issues at home as well as foreign policy, very willing to challenge Democratic presidents and Democratic leaders when they&#8217;re wrong—I think there would be an awfully lot of people, even on the ground in Washington state, who would be more welcoming to him than to most candidates. So I think it&#8217;s within the realm of possibility, but I cannot emphasize to you that it is a hard, hard leap, something relatively unprecedented.
AMY GOODMAN : And, of course, he opposed the intervention in Libya, and with the war talk around Iran, a very significant voice, antiwar voice, in the Congress. AMYGOODMAN: I wanted to turn to another of the races that hasn’t got as much attention. But this is Dennis Kucinich, the race between Dennis Kucinich and Marcy Kaptur in a redrawn district in Ohio. The significance of Marcy Kaptur’s victory? And now she’s going to be up against the man who won the Republican primary, the man who most of America knows as "Joe the Plumber." John Nichols?

JOHNNICHOLS: Sure. It’s an overwhelmingly Democratic district, so at the end of the day the likelihood is that whoever won this primary was going to go on to win. And I think Marcy Kaptur will beat Joe the Plumber, probably with relative ease. But the primary contest was in many ways a heartbreaking one, because you have very few people in Congress who are willing to stand up and say bold things on core economic issues and on issues of war and peace. And so, what Republican remapping folks, the redistricting commission in Ohio, did was jam together two very Democratic districts and take two of the more, I’d say, independent and outspoken Democrats in the Congress, put them together in the same seat, and force them to fight it out. Kaptur won not because Dennis Kucinich is a bad guy or somehow the people turned against him, but because the district at least marginally favored her. It was more of her turf than Dennis Kucinich’s turf. But it was a—it was a rough primary. They fought with each other very hard.

At the end of the day, however, I think we ought to reflect, at least for a moment, on the real loss for Congress. Losing either of these members would have been serious. Kaptur was, of course, the person who in Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story referred to the bank bailouts as an economic coup d’état. She’s been an incredibly outspoken critic of big banks and Wall Street. Losing her would have been a bad thing. But losing Dennis Kucinich, I think, is a real tragedy for Congress. This is—

AMYGOODMAN: I guess—

JOHNNICHOLS: Yeah.

AMYGOODMAN: —the question is, will he be lost?

JOHNNICHOLS: Ah.

AMYGOODMAN: When I was in Seattle last May, in Washington—

JOHNNICHOLS: Yeah.

AMYGOODMAN: —I actually bumped into Congress Member Kucinich and talked to him about why he was there in the state of Washington.

REP. DENNISKUCINICH: Ohio has a redistricting. Ohio is losing two seats. My district is quite likely to be one of them. So people have asked me, "Well, if the Republicans redistrict you, are you just going to quit?" And I said, "Look, I’m in Congress to speak out for workers’ rights, for human rights, for peace, for the environment. And so, I’d like to continue that work, and if I can’t continue it in the area that I’m representing now, then I’m going to look elsewhere."

AMYGOODMAN: And so, the question is whether Congress Member Kucinich would establish residency in Washington state, although wouldn’t that be difficult, as he still represents the people of Cleveland in Congress, John Nichols?

JOHNNICHOLS: Yes, he would have to step down to change his residency, if I understand it correctly. But he does have time to do it. The Washington state primary is very, very late. And so, the filing deadline for running in this new seat in Washington state in the Seattle area is not until June. And so, Senator—or Congressman Kucinich could make this move.

It’s very, very hard, having run for a seat in one state, to then jump to another state and say you want to make a try there. This is much more of a European model. In England, for instance, something like that might happen quite commonly, because under their parliamentary system, members often represent areas that they’re not from. In America, we have much more of a tradition of sort of locally rooted candidates. And so, I think it would be a very tough jump.

By the same token, as I was saying before, I think losing Dennis Kucinich, with his outspoken antiwar stances and also his sort of rapid response on so many issues—he’s usually the quickest member to be up and running with a progressive response to economic issues at home as well as foreign policy, very willing to challenge Democratic presidents and Democratic leaders when they’re wrong—I think there would be an awfully lot of people, even on the ground in Washington state, who would be more welcoming to him than to most candidates. So I think it’s within the realm of possibility, but I cannot emphasize to you that it is a hard, hard leap, something relatively unprecedented.

AMYGOODMAN: And, of course, he opposed the intervention in Libya, and with the war talk around Iran, a very significant voice, antiwar voice, in the Congress.

In his State of the Union address, many heard echoes of the Barack Obama of old, the presidential aspirant of 2007 and 2008. Among the populist pledges rolled out in the speech was tough talk against the too-big-to-fail banks that have funded his campaigns and for whom many of his key advisers have worked: “The rest of us are not bailing you out ever again,” he promised.

President Obama also made a striking announcement, one that could have been written by the Occupy Wall Street General Assembly: “I’m asking my attorney general to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorneys general to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis. This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans.”

Remarkably, President Obama named New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman as co-chairperson of the Unit on Mortgage Origination and Securitization Abuses. Schneiderman was on a team of state attorneys general negotiating a settlement with the nation’s five largest banks. He opposed the settlement as being too limited and offering overly generous immunity from future prosecution for financial fraud. For his outspoken consumer advocacy, he was kicked off the negotiating team. He withdrew his support of the settlement talks, along with several other key attorneys general, including California’s Kamala Harris, an Obama supporter, and Delaware’s Beau Biden, the vice president’s son.

In an op-ed penned last November, Schneiderman and Biden wrote, “We recognized early this year that, though many public officials—including state attorneys general, members of Congress and the Obama administration—have delved into aspects of the bubble and crash, we needed a more comprehensive investigation before the financial institutions at the heart of the crisis are granted broad releases from liability.”

When news of Schneiderman’s appointment surfaced, MoveOn.org sent an email to its members declaring: “Just weeks ago, this investigation wasn’t even on the table, and the big banks were pushing for a broad settlement that would have made it impossible. ... This is truly a huge victory for the 99 percent movement.”

The stakes are very high for the public, and for President Obama. He relied heavily on Wall Street backers to fund his massive campaign war chest in 2008. Now, in this post-Citizens United era, with expected billion-dollar campaign budgets, Obama could find himself out of favor with Wall Street. For the public, as noted by the Center for Responsible Lending: “More than 20,000 new families face foreclosure each month, including a disproportionate percentage of African-American and Latino households. CRL research indicates that we are only about halfway through the crisis.”

Unanswered at this point is whether or not Schneiderman’s appointment signals his willingness to go along with the multistate settlement now said to be nearing completion. Details are not yet public, but the deal is said to involve a $25 billion payment from the largest banks as a settlement for charges surrounding problematic mortgage-loan practices like robo-signing documents and grossly inadequate loan servicing, making foreclosures more likely. Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, who has been doing essential investigative reporting on the financial crisis, told me: “It doesn’t make sense for companies to settle without New York or California, since the potential liability from those two states alone could put them out of business, could cripple any of the too-big-to-fail banks.”

Obama is aware that those at the Occupy Wall Street protests around the country include many who were his most active supporters during the 2008 campaign. Does the formation of the new task force signify a move to more progressive policies, as MoveOn suggests?

Longtime consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader doesn’t hold much hope: “This financial crimes unit, that’s like putting another label on a few doors in the Justice Department without a real expansion in the budget.” Delaware’s Biden expressed similar concerns about the task force, asking: “How many FBI agents are being put on it? How many investigators? How many prosecutors?”

This is the Occupy Wall Street conflict distilled. Will Eric Schneiderman’s new job lead to the indictment of fraudulent financiers, or to just another indictment of our corrupt political system?

NERMEENSHAIKH: We turn now to the upcoming Iowa caucus. The Occupy movement is making its presence felt in Iowa ahead of the nation’s first nominating contest, set for January 3rd, and it has made President Obama—not the Republican field of candidates—the target of one of its first major stands. On Monday, eight people affiliated with Occupy Des Moines held a protest at the Iowa Democratic Party headquarters. Occupy demonstrators have also targeted the "Obama for America" office in recent days, protesting measures being considered in Washington dealing with defense spending, a planned oil pipeline and jobless benefits.

On Saturday, members from Occupy Omaha and Occupy Iowa City joined Occupy Des Moines with Veterans for Peace, the Catholic Worker community, and Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement outside the Obama campaign headquarters. Using the human microphone to amplify their voices, they listed their demands.

OCCUPYPROTESTERS: Cut the U.S. military budget in half, dismantle our U.S. military empire, and rejoin the community of nations, so we can create jobs, balance the budget, meet our people’s needs here, and help the human community to heal our dying planet.

NERMEENSHAIKH: Norm Sterzenbach, the executive director of the Iowa Democratic Party, responded to protesters with the following statement, quote: "While we recognize their right to lawful protests, an occupation of our office is not acceptable and only interferes with the work we do to elect Democrats and build a better future for Iowa and our nation. It’s unfortunate that some members chose to face arrest, rather than leave as they were asked to do multiple times."

AMYGOODMAN: Well, the Occupy movement now appears set to turn its focus to Republicans, who will be crisscrossing the state for the next two weeks seeking voters’ support. They plan to hold a people’s caucus on December 27th as part of a week of direct action and discussions surrounding the caucuses.

Jessica Mazour from Occupy Des Moines is one of the protesters trying to bring the Occupy messages to the U.S. political debate.

JESSICAMAZOUR: I’m from Des Moines, Iowa. I’m part of Occupy Des Moines. I’m on the action and events committee. We have adopted the grievances of Occupy Wall Street. I think some of the ones almost everyone can agree on would be the ending corporate greed and getting money out of politics, because, in a way, if we can get that, that’s going to help all the other issues that everyone brings to the table.

AMYGOODMAN: For more, we go to the heart of the upcoming caucus: Des Moines, Iowa. We’re joined by DN! video stream by Hugh Espey, the executive director of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement. It’s a 36-year-old grassroots organization with over 4,000 members.

Hugh Espey, talk about why you’re targeting the Democrats as well as the Republicans in this two weeks leading up to the Iowa caucuses.

HUGHESPEY: Well, we feel both major political parties, both the Democrats and the Republicans, have been paying too much attention to Wall Street and the big banks and not enough attention to everyday people. So, in other words, they’ve been doing the bidding of the 1 percent versus the 99 percent. And we want both political parties to know that we want government of, by and for the people, not government of, by and for the corporations. So that’s why we’re taking our message to both Democrats and President Obama—I mean, Republicans and President Obama.

AMYGOODMAN: Talk about the arrests that took place.

HUGHESPEY: Well, you know, on Monday, there were eight people that were arrested at the Democratic headquarters. We support what those folks were doing. In fact, we were there at the Obama headquarters on Saturday for a joint rally. We lifted up immigration issues, and we were there in solidarity with Veterans for Peace and others that were fighting back against the permanent war economy. So, we think that we have a right to—a constitutional right to state our purpose and to call for and to address grievances that we have with the government and the corporate control over the government. So, these sorts of protests are going to continue, until we are—have a system that puts people before profits and communities before corporations. It’s that simple. We’re fighting back against corporate greed, and we’re fighting back against corporate control of our democracy.

NERMEENSHAIKH: At a Republican presidential debate in South Carolina last month, several contenders accused Obama of being too soft on Iran. However, Ron Paul offered a different take on dealing with Iran. I want to ask you about the surge in popularity enjoyed by Ron Paul, but first let’s just go to that clip.

REP. RONPAUL: I’m afraid what’s going on right now is similar to the war propaganda that went on against Iraq. And you know they didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, and it was orchestrated. And it was, to me, a tragedy of what’s happened these past last 10 years, the death and destruction, $4 billion — $4 trillion in debt. So, no, it’s not worthwhile going to war. If you do, you get a declaration of war, you fight it, and you win it and get it over with.

AMYGOODMAN: That was Ron Paul. Hugh Espey, can you talk about his surge in Iowa right now?

HUGHESPEY: Well, we—yeah, over the past two weeks, he has surged. In fact, the poll just this past weekend, three days ago, shows him at 23 percent of likely caucus-goers, Romney at 20, and Gingrich at 14. Now Gingrich has fallen from 27 percent two weeks ago, so his support has been cut in half.

What I think about Paul and that surge is, one, his supporters tend to be younger. They’re very passionate. He’s got a great field operation in lots and lots of counties across the state. And really, the caucuses are about organization. You’re going to win, or you’re more likely to win, if you have volunteers and staff in place in all 99 counties that are going to turn out people on caucus night. Keep in mind, there are 1,800—almost 1,800 caucuses on the evening of January 3rd. So there’s lots of places where people show up. And you’ve got to have an organization in place to do that.

AMYGOODMAN: Clearly, Newt Gingrich has taken a nosedive right now. Massive ads from a number of the different Republican candidates against him, not just from candidates, but from PACs that don’t affiliate but are clearly—for example, supporting Mitt Romney—that are clearly eroding Newt Gingrich’s support. Can you talk about the money that’s pouring in right now in Iowa?

HUGHESPEY: Well, you know, and we saw this two years ago, too. And you know, that that’s one of the problems that we see with our political system, in terms of—we’ve got to get money out and people in. You know, the Citizens United decision two years ago just opened up the floodgates. We need public financing. We need to end corporate personhood. But those negative ads have taken a hit on Gingrich, and I think probably the electorate and Republican caucus-goers have—see him now more as erratic, arrogant and somewhat of a bully.

AMYGOODMAN: Hugh Espey, we want to thank you for being with us. Of course, we’ll continue to cover the Iowa caucus. Hugh Espey is executive director of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, a 36-year-old grassroots organization with more than 4,000 members.

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Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500America's Not Broke: Solving the Debt Crisis by Making Nation More Equitable, Green & Securehttp://www.democracynow.org/2011/11/22/americas_not_broke_solving_the_debt
tag:democracynow.org,2011-11-22:en/story/23496a AMY GOODMAN : We turn to Washington, where the bipartisan so-called &quot;supercommittee&quot; has failed to reach an agreement on reducing the federal deficit. On Monday, Democrats and Republicans abandoned their effort for a sweeping deal, after three months of talks that failed to bridge deep divides over taxes and spending. The full Congress will now have a little over a year to come up with an alternative. A trigger of $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts over 10 years to military and domestic programs takes effect in 2013.
At the White House last night, President Obama faulted Republicans for the impasse. He vowed to veto any Republican effort to exempt military spending from the mandated spending cuts in 2013.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : They continue to insist on protecting $100 billion worth of tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans, at any cost, even if it means reducing the deficit with deep cuts to things like education and medical research, even if it means deep cuts in Medicare. So, at this point at least, they simply will not budge from that negotiating position. And so far, that refusal continues to be the main stumbling block that has prevented Congress from reaching an agreement to further reduce our deficit.
AMY GOODMAN : Although the news of the supercommittee&#8217;s failure made for a somber mood on Capitol Hill Monday, some say the bipartisan deadlock could leave more room for taxpayers in shaping the nation&#8217;s fiscal policy. Instead of a select group of lawmakers, the full Congress will now be tasked with reaching a spending deal during a year when many of its members are up for re-election. They&#8217;ll be doing so amidst a political landscape that&#8217;s different than it was when the supercommittee began three months ago with the Occupy Wall Street movement now in full swing.
Well, on the heels of the supercommittee&#8217;s failure, we look at a new report that suggests a series of fiscal proposals that try to address the concerns expressed in the Occupy protests nationwide. The report is released by the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. It&#8217;s called &quot;America Isn&#8217;t Broke: How to Pay for the Crisis While Making the Country More Equitable, Green, and Secure.&quot; We turn now to Sarah Anderson. She is with the Institute for Policy Studies.
Welcome to Democracy Now! Talk about the significance of this debt lock in Washington, the failure of the supercommittee, and why you think the country isn&#8217;t broke, Sarah.
SARAH ANDERSON : Yes. Well, my guess is that over this Thanksgiving holiday, one thing families will not be giving thanks for is their effective representation in Congress. I think this has done even more to really lower opinions about Congress right now. But I&#8217;m hoping that as they regroup, that Democrats might decide to take advantage of this window between now and January 2013 , when these automated cuts are supposed to go into effect, to really do what they should have been doing all along, which is working with their base to develop a much bolder vision for where they want the country to go and to build a popular force around that. I think that&#8217;s what&#8217;s going to change the dynamic here.
And our report is really focused on this. As you said, it&#8217;s called &quot;America Isn&#8217;t Broke.&quot; It reminds people that we&#8217;re a rich country. We&#8217;ve just been spending too much money on war and handing out tax breaks to rich people and corporations. And we identify a number of fiscal reforms that could, as you said, save—create $824 billion in savings, while making the country stronger by making us more equitable, by having a cleaner environment, and making us safer. And so, first of all, we tackle the problem of Wall Street and the wealthy not paying their fair share. For example, one of the proposals we recommend that&#8217;s gaining a lot of traction, I think, among the general public is to put a very small tax on trades of stock and derivatives and bonds, a Wall Street tax, that could raise a lot of money while also discouraging the kind of short-term, high-frequency trading that doesn&#8217;t have any real social value and can make our markets less stable.
AMY GOODMAN : Sarah, talk about how the media has framed what&#8217;s happening in this country, the debt, and what you think is the most effective way to talk about it.
SARAH ANDERSON : Right. Well, there—what&#8217;s overwhelmed this debate is the idea that we&#8217;re broke, that we have no choice except to make these painful cuts that will affect the poor, affect the elderly, affect all of us. And what people need to remember is that we are a rich country and that this crisis is actually an opportunity to harness our abundant resources in ways that will position us better for the future. So things like slashing all of the subsidies that we now hand out to the big fossil fuel industries, these are subsidies that are keeping us dependent on foreign oil. If we remove those, companies will have more of an incentive to adopt new green technologies that can make us more competitive.
And then, on the war issue, the public opinion polls are showing the majority of Americans support cutting—ending the war in Afghanistan. We can save money by doing that and also eliminating all kinds of obsolete weapons systems, military bases that were developed during the Cold War era and really serve no real purpose anymore. So we have plenty of money in this country to not only deal with our deficit over the long term, but free up funds to put into real job creation now.
AMY GOODMAN : And the issue of the environment, as we move into this U.N. global summit that&#8217;s taking place in Durban, South Africa, why this actually—the crisis of climate change costs this country money, as opposed to what is constantly being put forward, that green solutions would cost the country at a time that we cannot afford this?
SARAH ANDERSON : Exactly. This is an issue I think the supercommittee completely ignored: all of the money that is now going into these perverse incentives to support the fossil fuel industry, making oil and gas artificially cheap. If these industries had to pay the full cost of the environmental harm caused by their products and services, they would have a much greater incentive to move into greener technologies. We&#8217;re seeing other countries develop their own domestic industries, to develop alternative energies, technologies. We&#8217;re falling behind in that area. And again, to have a vision of our economy that is looking 20, 30 years down the road, if you do that, you see we need to invest now in ways that can not only create a lot of jobs and put people back to work, but also position America to be much more competitive and healthy down the road.
AMY GOODMAN : So, in the end, are you—do you think that it&#8217;s a good thing that this committee has gone down in super flames?
SARAH ANDERSON : Yeah. I mean, no deal is better than a bad deal that would have resulted in a lot of immediate cuts that would have caused real suffering in our communities. We do have this window between now and January 2013 , when the automatic cuts are supposed to go into effect. People should really redouble their efforts to push for a bold vision for this economy that would make us stronger, that would have a more equitable society, a healthier democracy. This is an opportunity to push that vision. And we&#8217;re already seeing in the polls that the majority of Americans are for increasing taxes on the wealthy. That means a lot of Republicans out there disagree with the position of the people who are representing them in Congress.
AMY GOODMAN : Sarah Anderson, we have to leave it there.
SARAH ANDERSON : So this is a real opportunity to turn things around.
AMY GOODMAN : I thank you so much for being with us.
SARAH ANDERSON : Thank you. Sure.
AMY GOODMAN : Of the Institute for Policy Studies. Back in 20 seconds. AMYGOODMAN: We turn to Washington, where the bipartisan so-called "supercommittee" has failed to reach an agreement on reducing the federal deficit. On Monday, Democrats and Republicans abandoned their effort for a sweeping deal, after three months of talks that failed to bridge deep divides over taxes and spending. The full Congress will now have a little over a year to come up with an alternative. A trigger of $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts over 10 years to military and domestic programs takes effect in 2013.

At the White House last night, President Obama faulted Republicans for the impasse. He vowed to veto any Republican effort to exempt military spending from the mandated spending cuts in 2013.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: They continue to insist on protecting $100 billion worth of tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans, at any cost, even if it means reducing the deficit with deep cuts to things like education and medical research, even if it means deep cuts in Medicare. So, at this point at least, they simply will not budge from that negotiating position. And so far, that refusal continues to be the main stumbling block that has prevented Congress from reaching an agreement to further reduce our deficit.

AMYGOODMAN: Although the news of the supercommittee’s failure made for a somber mood on Capitol Hill Monday, some say the bipartisan deadlock could leave more room for taxpayers in shaping the nation’s fiscal policy. Instead of a select group of lawmakers, the full Congress will now be tasked with reaching a spending deal during a year when many of its members are up for re-election. They’ll be doing so amidst a political landscape that’s different than it was when the supercommittee began three months ago with the Occupy Wall Street movement now in full swing.

Well, on the heels of the supercommittee’s failure, we look at a new report that suggests a series of fiscal proposals that try to address the concerns expressed in the Occupy protests nationwide. The report is released by the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. It’s called "America Isn’t Broke: How to Pay for the Crisis While Making the Country More Equitable, Green, and Secure." We turn now to Sarah Anderson. She is with the Institute for Policy Studies.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Talk about the significance of this debt lock in Washington, the failure of the supercommittee, and why you think the country isn’t broke, Sarah.

SARAHANDERSON: Yes. Well, my guess is that over this Thanksgiving holiday, one thing families will not be giving thanks for is their effective representation in Congress. I think this has done even more to really lower opinions about Congress right now. But I’m hoping that as they regroup, that Democrats might decide to take advantage of this window between now and January 2013, when these automated cuts are supposed to go into effect, to really do what they should have been doing all along, which is working with their base to develop a much bolder vision for where they want the country to go and to build a popular force around that. I think that’s what’s going to change the dynamic here.

And our report is really focused on this. As you said, it’s called "America Isn’t Broke." It reminds people that we’re a rich country. We’ve just been spending too much money on war and handing out tax breaks to rich people and corporations. And we identify a number of fiscal reforms that could, as you said, save—create $824 billion in savings, while making the country stronger by making us more equitable, by having a cleaner environment, and making us safer. And so, first of all, we tackle the problem of Wall Street and the wealthy not paying their fair share. For example, one of the proposals we recommend that’s gaining a lot of traction, I think, among the general public is to put a very small tax on trades of stock and derivatives and bonds, a Wall Street tax, that could raise a lot of money while also discouraging the kind of short-term, high-frequency trading that doesn’t have any real social value and can make our markets less stable.

AMYGOODMAN: Sarah, talk about how the media has framed what’s happening in this country, the debt, and what you think is the most effective way to talk about it.

SARAHANDERSON: Right. Well, there—what’s overwhelmed this debate is the idea that we’re broke, that we have no choice except to make these painful cuts that will affect the poor, affect the elderly, affect all of us. And what people need to remember is that we are a rich country and that this crisis is actually an opportunity to harness our abundant resources in ways that will position us better for the future. So things like slashing all of the subsidies that we now hand out to the big fossil fuel industries, these are subsidies that are keeping us dependent on foreign oil. If we remove those, companies will have more of an incentive to adopt new green technologies that can make us more competitive.

And then, on the war issue, the public opinion polls are showing the majority of Americans support cutting—ending the war in Afghanistan. We can save money by doing that and also eliminating all kinds of obsolete weapons systems, military bases that were developed during the Cold War era and really serve no real purpose anymore. So we have plenty of money in this country to not only deal with our deficit over the long term, but free up funds to put into real job creation now.

AMYGOODMAN: And the issue of the environment, as we move into this U.N. global summit that’s taking place in Durban, South Africa, why this actually—the crisis of climate change costs this country money, as opposed to what is constantly being put forward, that green solutions would cost the country at a time that we cannot afford this?

SARAHANDERSON: Exactly. This is an issue I think the supercommittee completely ignored: all of the money that is now going into these perverse incentives to support the fossil fuel industry, making oil and gas artificially cheap. If these industries had to pay the full cost of the environmental harm caused by their products and services, they would have a much greater incentive to move into greener technologies. We’re seeing other countries develop their own domestic industries, to develop alternative energies, technologies. We’re falling behind in that area. And again, to have a vision of our economy that is looking 20, 30 years down the road, if you do that, you see we need to invest now in ways that can not only create a lot of jobs and put people back to work, but also position America to be much more competitive and healthy down the road.

AMYGOODMAN: So, in the end, are you—do you think that it’s a good thing that this committee has gone down in super flames?

SARAHANDERSON: Yeah. I mean, no deal is better than a bad deal that would have resulted in a lot of immediate cuts that would have caused real suffering in our communities. We do have this window between now and January 2013, when the automatic cuts are supposed to go into effect. People should really redouble their efforts to push for a bold vision for this economy that would make us stronger, that would have a more equitable society, a healthier democracy. This is an opportunity to push that vision. And we’re already seeing in the polls that the majority of Americans are for increasing taxes on the wealthy. That means a lot of Republicans out there disagree with the position of the people who are representing them in Congress.

Back when Barack Obama was still just a U.S. senator running for president, he told a group of donors in a New Jersey suburb, “Make me do it.” He was borrowing from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who used the same phrase (according to Harry Belafonte, who heard the story directly from Eleanor Roosevelt) when responding to legendary union organizer A. Philip Randolph’s demand for civil rights for African-Americans.

While President Obama has made concession after concession to both the corporate-funded tea party and his Wall Street donors, now that he is again in campaign mode, his progressive critics are being warned not to attack him, as that might aid and abet the Republican bid for the White House.

Enter the 99 percenters. The Occupy Wall Street ranks continue to grow, inspiring more than 1,000 solidarity protests around the country and the globe. After weeks, and one of the largest mass arrests in U.S. history, Obama finally commented: “I think people are frustrated, and the protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.” But neither he nor his advisers—or the Republicans—know what to do with this burgeoning mass movement.

Following the controversial Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which allows unlimited corporate donations to support election advertising, the hunger for campaign cash is insatiable. The Obama re-election campaign aims to raise $1 billion. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the financial industry was Obama’s second-largest source of 2008 campaign contributions, surpassed only by the lawyers/lobbyists industry sector.

The suggestion that a loss for Obama would signal a return to the Bush era has some merit: The Associated Press reported recently that “almost all of [Mitt] Romney’s 22 special advisers held senior Bush administration positions in diplomacy, defense or intelligence. Two former Republican senators are included as well as Bush-era CIA chief Michael Hayden and former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.” But so is the Obama presidency an expansion of the Bush era, unless there is a new “Push era.”

The organic strength of Occupy Wall Street defies the standard dismissals from the corporate media’s predictably stale stable of pundits. For them, it is all about the divide between the Republicans and the Democrats, a divide the protesters have a hard time seeing. They see both parties captured by Wall Street. Richard Haass, head of the establishment Council on Foreign Relations, said of the protesters, “They’re not serious.” He asked why they are not talking about entitlements. Perhaps it is because, to the 99 percent, Social Security and Medicare are not the problem, but rather growing inequality, with the 400 richest Americans having more wealth than half of all Americans combined. And then there is the overwhelming cost and toll of war, first and foremost the lives lost, but also the lives destroyed, on all sides.

It’s why, for example, Jose Vasquez, executive director of Iraq Veterans Against the War, was down at Occupy Wall Street on Monday night. He told me: “It’s no secret that a lot of veterans are facing unemployment, homelessness and a lot of other issues that are dealing with the economy. A lot of people get deployed multiple times and are still struggling. … I’ve met a lot of veterans who have come here. I just met a guy who is active duty, took leave just to come to Occupy Wall Street.”

The historic election of Barack Obama was achieved by millions of people across the political spectrum. For years during the Bush administration, people felt they were hitting their heads against a brick wall. With the election, the wall had become a door, but it was only open a crack. The question was, would it be kicked open or slammed shut? It is not up to one person. Obama had moved from community organizer in chief to commander in chief. When forces used to having the ear of the most powerful person on earth whisper their demands in the Oval Office, the president must see a force more powerful outside his window, whether he likes it or not, and say, “If I do that, they will storm the Bastille.” If there’s no one out there, we are all in big trouble.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 950 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

For more, I’m joined now by two journalists who have been closely following issues of voting rights in the United States ahead of the 2012 elections.

We’re joined by Ari Berman, who wrote about the Republican-backed laws that stand to disenfranchise voters in a recent piece for Rolling Stone magazine_ called "The GOP War on Voting." He is the contributing editor also for The Nation magazine and author of Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics.

We’re also joined by Lois Beckett, a reporter for ProPublica. Her most recent piece, "The Hidden Hands of Redistricting: Corporations and Other Powerful Interests," which she co-wrote. The article investigates how money is helping reshape congressional districts along partisan lines, a practice known as gerrymandering.

Ari Berman, lay out your piece and what you found.

ARIBERMAN: Sure, Amy. So, since the 2010 election, 34 states introduced legislation, and 12 states passed legislation, implemented legislation, that’s basically designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process, pushed overwhelmingly by Republicans. So what we’re seeing across the country, it’s now harder to register to vote. You have states like Alabama, Tennessee and Kansas requiring proof of citizenship. It’s harder for outside groups to register new voters in states like Florida and Texas. Groups like the League of Women Voters have had to suspend their voter registration drives. Maine repealed, for example, same-day Election Day voter registration.

Then we’re seeing a scaling back of early voting. So, states like Florida and Ohio, critical battleground states, have shrunk their early voting periods and actually eliminated voting on Sunday before the election, when black churches historically mobilize their constituents.

Then we have six states requiring government- or state-issued photo IDs. What people don’t realize about these photo IDs is that 10 percent of American citizens don’t have them, including 18 percent of young people and 25 percent of African Americans. So it’s a very high percentage.

And then, finally, two states, Iowa and Florida, are disenfranchising ex-felons who have served their time and would have been able to vote previously.

So those four steps are really the pillars of what I termed "the GOP war on voting."

AMYGOODMAN: Who is behind all of this, Ari Berman?

ARIBERMAN: Sure. Well, a few different people. I mean, number one, Republican officials all across the country are behind it. And then you have certain corporate groups that have been pushing it. One of the main players in the photo ID component has been the American Legislative Exchange Council, otherwise known as ALEC, who, as you know, is funded in part by the Koch brothers, the billionaire brothers from Kansas. And what ALEC did is, after the 2008 election, they drafted mock legislation for states to then pass. And what happened is, in five of these states that passed photo ID laws, the legislation was co-sponsored by members of ALEC, and in three states—Texas—it’s Texas—I’m trying to think—Texas, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—the draft legislation that ALEC gave them was basically almost identical to the legislation that was introduced. So that’s—and we see ALEC playing a major role.

The founder of ALEC, Paul Weyrich, back in 1980, told a group of Christian right ministers, he said, "I don’t want everyone to vote." He said, "Quite frankly, our leverage in the election goes up as the voting populace goes down." And I believe those words are really the mantra for all this legislation we’ve seen introduced this year.

AMYGOODMAN: If you, Lois Beckett, could talk more about the corporate money behind what we’re seeing taking place?

LOISBECKETT: I think it’s so interesting, when you talk to these redistricting groups, they’ll tell you that, dollar for dollar, campaign contributions are not as effective as redistricting, because redistricting shapes who can win an election in a state for 10 years, for a full decade. And so, what we’ve seen in states across the nation is companies like CSX Railways, like Honeywell, others like ExxonMobil in California, really paying to sort of nonprofit advocacy groups, with innocent names like Protect Your Vote, to shape elections in ways that are partisan and ways that are often often personal, paying for particular legislators that have supported them in the past, the least democratic process you can imagine.

AMYGOODMAN: Name some names of who is behind the money.

LOISBECKETT: So, in Florida what we found was that a particular African-American congresswoman, Corrine Brown, ended up opposing two amendments that would make redistricting more fair in Florida, and she was backed by—her two big donors were CSX Railways and Honeywell International. Both donated to this Protect Your Vote campaign, which said that it was protecting minority rights but was in fact just trying to protect Corrine Brown’s district.

AMYGOODMAN: Can you talk about the power of the Koch brothers and what you found and who exactly they are, their significance?

LOISBECKETT: Yeah, I think the real challenge is that what we found is that redistricting groups aren’t required to disclose their donors, by campaign laws, even though they’re so essential to the election process, and so that in most cases we know that there are these groups, we know that they’re having a big impact, and we don’t know for sure who their donors are. So in Minnesota, for instance, the Republican redistricting strategy and their lawsuits are being financed by Minnesotans for a Fair Redistricting. As a redistricting group, they don’t have to disclose who their donors are. We know that they share a lot of leadership with the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota. We know the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota has ties to the Koch brothers. But because they don’t have to disclose where they get their money from, we don’t know what they’re getting, we don’t know how much they’re getting, we don’t know who is giving to them. It’s just—there’s no way for citizens to tell, you know, who is really influencing this.

AMYGOODMAN: Sometimes, though, as you point out, you can look at addresses of where organizations are—you know, when they have to show where they’re based.

LOISBECKETT: Yeah, and exactly that’s what we did in Minnesota, is merely say that Annette Meeks, who’s associated with Minnesotans for a Fair Redistricting, and her husband are both associated with the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota. They share—the organizations are registered at the same address, but Annette Meeks merely said that there was no association and said that they comply with all legal requirements in terms of disclosure. But the legal requirements are very minimal. They don’t have to disclose almost anything.

AMYGOODMAN: Can you talk about the effects of the midterm elections and the shift to Republicans in Congress, how they have affected all of this?

LOISBECKETT: I think one thing that is really interesting is that when we looked in Florida, what we saw that even the strongly Republican electorate, really, they believed in making voting more fair, the voters themselves. In Florida, that strong Republican turnout, 63 percent of voters pushed for a fairer voting law. So I think what we have to remember is that people on the ground, whether they’re Democrats or Republicans, often want a fairer redistricting process, and it’s the people in the back rooms and it’s corporations who have their own interests in minds and don’t have the interests of the voters, whether they’re Democrats or Republicans.

AMYGOODMAN: Ari, can you elaborate on that?

ARIBERMAN: Sure, well, Republicans in Florida definitely weren’t interested in making voting easier, because Governor Rick Scott and the Republican legislature down there, they did three major things that are going to affect the 2012 election. Remember, this is Florida, the state that had the 2000 election fiasco. So, number one, now it’s harder to register to vote in Florida, as I mentioned earlier. Groups like the League of Women Voters, nonpartisan groups, have had to shut down because of all these bureaucratic requirements and fines they’re going to face.

Number two, early voting in Florida—

AMYGOODMAN: Fines they’re going to face?

ARIBERMAN: Up to $1000 fines, and for a volunteer group that’s registering voters, that’s just way too much for them to deal with.

Number two, cutting back on early voting. As I said, it was two weeks. Now it’s eight days, no voting on Sunday before the election, when black voters historically mobilize their constituents.

Number three, ex-felons who were going to have the right to vote under a previous Republican governor, Charlie Crist, now do not have the right to vote under the current Republican governor. That’s 100,000 ex-felons, nonviolent ex-felons, who served their time and are now permanently disenfranchised from the electoral process.

So we’re facing a situation in Florida right now where, instead of one problem like we faced in 2000, we could be facing three different issues heading to the polls in that one state.

AMYGOODMAN: The Brennan Center says these new laws could make it significantly harder for more than five million eligible voters to vote in 2012.

ARIBERMAN: It’s a staggering number, and it’s the first time we actually have a number that can quantify just how big a deal that is. And you take these states, you look at a state like Florida, you look at a state like Ohio, you look at a state like Wisconsin, these are pivotal battlegrounds, not only on the presidential level but on the state level. We’ve seen all these state-level upheavals in places like Ohio, in places like Wisconsin. And the most disturbing thing to me is that basically what’s happening is Republicans are trying to shape an electorate in their own favor and basically say to people, "Even if you disagree with us, now you can’t exercise your democratic right to vote us out of office," because you won’t have the right ID to vote. You won’t be able to register to vote. You won’t be able to exercise what should be, in my opinion, the most basic of democratic rights. And that’s a very chilling prospect, whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican.

AMYGOODMAN: Talk more about the Koch brothers.

ARIBERMAN: Sure. Well, the Koch brothers, as you know, their money is all over the place here. It’s in redistricting. It’s in voting. It’s in a larger campaign, basically, to make Republicans the dominant party. And so, what we saw is, the Koch Brothers bank-rolled so much of the victories of Republicans in the 2010 election. And now what’s happening is, now that the Republicans have power, they’re trying to keep it, and they’re trying to keep it by, for example, writing congressional maps to their favor and also writing election laws to their favor. And so, these are two ways, two, I think, huge sleeper issues in which the Koch brothers and other allied groups are basically undermining the very fabric of our democratic process.

AMYGOODMAN: Lois Beckett, explain exactly how this redistricting works, in terms of rewriting the map. How do you even figure out what would be in your favor or what wouldn’t be?

LOISBECKETT: So what’s really interesting right now is that there’s very sophisticated technology that allows you to look at maps down to the single census block and understand not only registered Democrats and Republicans, but also voting history for those individual people. So it’s possible with this technology for you to draw very particular maps. And you have to understand, with redistricting, there’s no fixed priority for how you draw the lines on the map. There are a lot of different conflicting priorities. You want to represent communities of interest. You want districts to be pretty compact and not spread out all over the map. And so, often state legislatures, which have the power over this in 37 of the states, have a lot of discretion in how they draw the lines, and do it very cynically just based on who they can elect and often on protecting incumbents. So what we see is not only partisan politics, but really people in power drawing lines that will keep them in power, drawing people out of their districts and drawing voters in that will vote for them.

AMYGOODMAN: And why is money so important here?

LOISBECKETT: Money is important for two reasons: one, because this redistricting software is pretty expensive, and hiring the people to do the research to find those perfect lines that work for you isn’t cheap; but the second thing is that redistricting is often decided then through lawsuits after the maps are drawn. And it’s these lawsuits, that happen in almost every state, that really cost a lot of money, and that’s what these corporate donors are often paying for.

AMYGOODMAN: The Justice Department said late Friday that based on their preliminary investigation, a congressional redistricting map signed into law by Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry appears to have been "adopted, at least in part, for the purpose of diminishing the ability of citizens of the United States, on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group, to elect their preferred candidates of choice" to Congress. That language is from Talking Points Memo. It came out a couple weeks ago, Ari Berman?

ARIBERMAN: Yeah. So what happened in Texas is the population growth was attributable to Hispanic growth, but Hispanics didn’t gain any congressional districts under the map. It was all going to go to white, Anglo Republicans. And the problem there is that the Justice Department has the authority under the Voting Rights Act to look at all of those states under the jurisdiction of the Voting Rights Act, which is basically every state in the South, through redistricting and through these new voting laws. And so, they have the power whether to say that these maps and these voting laws are illegal or they violate the Voting Rights Act. Based on what they saw in Texas, they found that at least for the—I believe it’s the State House and also for Congress, that those maps violated the Voting Rights Act.

On the voting piece, a lot of groups are asking the Justice Department to look at all these different states and see whether they violate the Voting Rights Act. The Justice Department has already sent pointed letters to both Texas and South Carolina, asking about how these new voting laws will affect minority citizens. So they are looking at this right now. It’s a good first step, based on what we’ve seen in Texas, but groups are asking them to stay aggressive and use the enforcement power they have. They really are the last check, in some cases, on these states.

AMYGOODMAN: Could either of you comment on the changing caucuses and primaries of states, and does this play in at all?

ARIBERMAN: Lois?

LOISBECKETT: I mean, I think the biggest change that we’re looking at in terms of redistricting is that many states are pushing for fairer and more transparent redistricting processes. California, for instance, now has an independent commission that’s going to be drawing the district lines. And what our investigation is about, continuing this year, is looking to see how much making the commissions more independent really gets money out of politics. And what we’ve seen initially in California is that even when you make a commission independent, corporate money will go underground, again coming up as these advocacy groups with these innocent names, and will find new ways to push their money to influence this process.

AMYGOODMAN: Your next piece?

LOISBECKETT: We’ll be looking at California in more depth.

AMYGOODMAN: Any last comments, Ari Berman?

ARIBERMAN: Well, I just think, in this discussion of voting, it shouldn’t be a left or right issue. It really should be a core issue that both parties work to uphold. On redistricting, both parties are complicit. On the voting that I’m talking about, all these voting laws, they are passed overwhelmingly by Republicans, and so I find it very disturbing that one party is going out of their way to make it so difficult for so many people, five million voters, to exercise what I said should be a basic constitutional right.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us. Lois Beckett is a reporter for ProPublica, and Ari Berman is a contributing writer for The Nation magazine. His latest piece is in Rolling Stone magazine; it’s called "The GOP War on Voting: In a Campaign Supported by the Koch Brothers, Republicans are Working to Prevent Millions of Democrats from Voting Next Year." We’ll link to both at our website at democracynow.org.

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Tue, 04 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400Bogus Postal Service Crisis Deserves to Get a Return to Senderhttp://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/9/28/bogus_postal_service_crisis_deserves_to_get_a_return_to_sender
tag:democracynow.org,2011-09-28:blog/fad3ea On any given Saturday, the line of people at my local post office in Manhattan&#8217;s Inwood section often stretches out to the street.
Some come to pick up their mail because of a broken box. Others bring wrapped boxes to send to relatives abroad. Many need to buy postal money orders for grandma in the Dominican Republic or Mexico.
Some even buy stamps.
All over America, the poorer the neighborhood, the longer the lines at the post office.
The idea that this most visible neighborhood presence of our national government for more than 200 years faces financial default on Sept. 30 is truly astounding.
Yet, that&#8217;s exactly what will happen unless the politicians in Washington act quickly.
Critics say the Internet, FedEx and UPS have turned the post office into a relic. That view ignores the reality that 30% of Americans still do not use the Internet&ndash;most of them poor and elderly. Or that the Postal Service had its two biggest years for mail volume in 2006 and 2007, just before the financial crash.
Those critics claim the agency is losing billions of dollars annually because of a bloated workforce that makes too much money and has generous health benefits and pensions.
Even President Obama&#8217;s postmaster general, Patrick Donahoe, seems to agree. Donahoe wants Congress to give him the power to trash a postal union contract he signed in May. He wants to lay off 120,000 workers and close thousands of post offices.
His agency is in such bad shape, Donahoe warns, that he cannot meet a $5.5 billion payment to the Treasury on Sept. 30 for future health benefits.
Union leaders and consumer advocates like Ralph Nader insist this is all a &quot;manufactured crisis&quot; to drive down wages and break the unions.
At least two recent postal audits seem to back up those claims. They show the government has been siphoning too much in Postal Service revenues to pay for health care and pension benefits.
Take the $5.5 billion the agency must pay the government in a few days. That&#8217;s part of a &quot;Postal Accountability&quot; law the Republicans pushed through in December 2006&ndash;just before they lost control of the House and Senate.
It requires the Postal Service to fully fund health benefits of retirees for the next 75 years. As a result, the agency must contribute $103 billion to that fund by 2016.
In other words, the Postal Service is paying for health care costs of people it hasn&#8217;t even hired yet. That&#8217;s something no other government or private company is required to do, Nader noted in a letter to Congress last week.
&quot;Read the rest of Juan Gonzalez&#8217;s column in The Daily News&quot;: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2011/09/28/2011-09-28_you_dont_have_mail_bogus_postal_service_crisis_deserves_to_get_a_return_to_sende.html#ixzz1ZG47reQS
On any given Saturday, the line of people at my local post office in Manhattan’s Inwood section often stretches out to the street.

Some come to pick up their mail because of a broken box. Others bring wrapped boxes to send to relatives abroad. Many need to buy postal money orders for grandma in the Dominican Republic or Mexico.

Some even buy stamps.

All over America, the poorer the neighborhood, the longer the lines at the post office.

The idea that this most visible neighborhood presence of our national government for more than 200 years faces financial default on Sept. 30 is truly astounding.

Yet, that’s exactly what will happen unless the politicians in Washington act quickly.

Critics say the Internet, FedEx and UPS have turned the post office into a relic. That view ignores the reality that 30% of Americans still do not use the Internet–most of them poor and elderly. Or that the Postal Service had its two biggest years for mail volume in 2006 and 2007, just before the financial crash.

Those critics claim the agency is losing billions of dollars annually because of a bloated workforce that makes too much money and has generous health benefits and pensions.

Even President Obama’s postmaster general, Patrick Donahoe, seems to agree. Donahoe wants Congress to give him the power to trash a postal union contract he signed in May. He wants to lay off 120,000 workers and close thousands of post offices.

His agency is in such bad shape, Donahoe warns, that he cannot meet a $5.5 billion payment to the Treasury on Sept. 30 for future health benefits.

Union leaders and consumer advocates like Ralph Nader insist this is all a "manufactured crisis" to drive down wages and break the unions.

At least two recent postal audits seem to back up those claims. They show the government has been siphoning too much in Postal Service revenues to pay for health care and pension benefits.

Take the $5.5 billion the agency must pay the government in a few days. That’s part of a "Postal Accountability" law the Republicans pushed through in December 2006–just before they lost control of the House and Senate.

It requires the Postal Service to fully fund health benefits of retirees for the next 75 years. As a result, the agency must contribute $103 billion to that fund by 2016.

In other words, the Postal Service is paying for health care costs of people it hasn’t even hired yet. That’s something no other government or private company is required to do, Nader noted in a letter to Congress last week.

"Read the rest of Juan Gonzalez’s column in The Daily News": http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2011/09/28/2011-09-28_you_dont_have_mail_bogus_postal_service_crisis_deserves_to_get_a_return_to_sende.html#ixzz1ZG47reQS

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Wed, 28 Sep 2011 10:36:00 -0400Shock Doctrine at U.S. Postal Service: Is a Manufactured Crisis Behind Push Toward Privatization?http://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/27/shock_doctrine_at_us_postal_service
tag:democracynow.org,2011-09-27:en/story/07ca2d NERMEEN SHAIKH : For months, Americans have heard dire warnings about the impending collapse of the United States Postal Service due to fiscal insolvency. Earlier this month, the U.S. Postmaster General, Patrick Donahoe, told Congress the USPS is close to default and unveiled a series of radical proposals to cut costs. Under Donahoe&#8217;s plan, the Postal Service would fire up to 120,000 workers, close several thousand facilities, scale back deliveries, and reduce benefits for retirees. Donahoe discussed his demands in an appearance on CNBC .
POSTMASTER GENERAL PATRICK DONAHOE : We need Congress to act immediately. We&#8217;ve been asking them—we went over today, had a hearing before the Senate. We need them to do three things: give us the opportunity to resolve this prepayment issue, the $5.5 billion; let us move from six-day to five-day delivery; and give us a refund. We&#8217;ve overpaid one of our retirement funds by $6.9 billion. Those three things. We can take care of the rest of the issues we need to take care of ourselves.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : But postal workers say the much-touted crisis facing the U.S. Postal Service isn&#8217;t what it seems. Rather, they point to a 2006 law that forced the USPS to find enough money to fund 75 years of retiree health benefits over just a 10-year span. The American Postal Workers Union says the law&#8217;s requirements account for 100 percent of the Service&#8217;s $20 billion in losses over the previous four years, without which the service would have turned a profit.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, today, postal workers and their supporters are holding events in every congressional district to press their demand for repealing the benefit-funding mandate. The events are part of a national day of action dubbed &quot;Save America&#8217;s Postal Service.&quot; In addition to pushing for legislative changes, the postal workers are also pushing back against calls for their workplace to be privatized.
I&#8217;m joined now by two guests to debate this issue. Chuck Zlatkin is the legislative and political director of the New York Metro Area Postal Union. He&#8217;s joining us here in New York. And joining us from Washington, D.C., is Gene Del Polito. He&#8217;s president of the Association for Postal Commerce in Washington, D.C.
Gene Del Polito, what&#8217;s the problem with the U.S. Post Office today?
GENE DEL POLITO : Well, actually, it&#8217;s a combination of a couple of things. But the fact is, is that the people who are responsible for coming up with the solution to the Postal Service&#8217;s problems have very fundamental disagreements in terms of the way they actually see what the cause of the problem is or what the solutions are likely to be. But to put it simply, the Postal Service is operating under a significant burden in terms of what it has to fund for its postal retirees. But at the same time, so much mail has been leaving the postal system for electronic alternatives that it now looks as if the Postal Service&#8217;s ability to attain the kind of revenue targets it would have achieved in the past is just no longer possible.
AMY GOODMAN : Is this a real crisis, Chuck Zlatkin?
CHUCK ZLATKIN : Well, it&#8217;s become a crisis, but we feel that it&#8217;s a manufactured crisis, because the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which my union opposed, which was supposed to prepare the Postal Service for the 21st century, has actually created this crisis.
AMY GOODMAN : Passed five years ago.
CHUCK ZLATKIN : In 2006, five years—had created this crisis, because it mandated that the Postal Service, every September 30th, has to write a check from its operating funds—that&#8217;s the only place it could come from—for $5.5 billion to the U.S. Treasury to partially—it&#8217;s involved in fully pre-funding future retirees&#8217; health benefits, for 75 years. You&#8217;re talking about funding the retirement benefits for people who haven&#8217;t even been born yet, let alone working in the Postal Service.
AMY GOODMAN : Wait, you have to explain this. Do other agencies have to do this?
CHUCK ZLATKIN : No, no other agency, no other corporation, no organization that we know of is mandated by law to do this.
AMY GOODMAN : Gene Del Polito, what is the logic of this?
GENE DEL POLITO : Well, to be honest, I can&#8217;t quite figure out what the logic is, either. Actually, the logic stems from the fact that the people who were involved from the Bush administration in the creation of the Postal Accountability Act had little faith that the Postal Service was going to remain a sustaining organization and wanted to be absolutely sure that whatever provisions needed to be put into the law to ensure that the U.S. Treasury would not be left on the hook for any unfunded liabilities, that it would be taken care of.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : Earlier this month, Gwen Ifill of PBS spoke with Fredric Rolando, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers. He insisted the U.S. Postal Service is not broke. Let&#8217;s go to that clip.
FREDERIC ROLANDO : During the last four fiscal years, the Postal Service, with the recession that we&#8217;ve been through, the worst recession in 80 years and the internet diversion, still showed an operational profit of almost $700 million during that period of time. The $20-plus billion that you read about in losses is nothing more than a congressional mandate that requires the Postal Service—required the Postal Service to take all of their cash and put it into a pre-funding account. The Postal Service actually has somewhere between $50 billion and $125 billion in their other funds that is not taxpayer money. They haven&#8217;t used a dime of taxpayer money in over 30 years. And the Congress just needs to act responsibly and quickly to give them access to those funds.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : Gene Del Polito, your response?
GENE DEL POLITO : Well, there was a time when what Mr. Rolando said would have been true, and that is the Postal Service&#8217;s losses were generated exclusively by the prepayments that they were required to make. However, if you look at their financial sheets today, you&#8217;ll find that by the end of this fiscal year, which should be up in a couple of days, the Postal Service, even if they were forgiven all of their obligations, would still not have enough money to be able to operate within the black. The Postal Service also manages what it does by its cash flow, and according to their own chief financial officer&#8217;s best projections, it now looks as if the Postal Service is going to flat run out of cash by July 2012 if nothing is absolutely done. It&#8217;s also extending the amount of time that it&#8217;s giving the people that it has contracts with, to actually manufacture equipment and do things, to see if they can get a longer period of time for payment for them in order to be able to stretch its cash. But there&#8217;s no doubt about it: the Postal Service is in a fiscal fix, and just relieving the obligation alone is not going to be enough. There needs to be much, much more done.
AMY GOODMAN : Chuck Zlatkin?
CHUCK ZLATKIN : Well, yes, there needs to be more done, but it&#8217;s not just relieving the future burdens. If the $25 billion is left to be paid into the future retiree health benefits plan, but if you got the money that was overpaid into the other fund, $50 billion is the low figure. So you pay off the future accountability requirements for the healthcare benefits, you pay down your debt, and then you use the excess money there to modernize, to develop things that bring more business, more people into the Postal Service. You have this extraordinary structure of places to do business, plants, trucks. Use it for the benefit of the American people. The Postal Service—it&#8217;s in the Constitution. Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 7 of the Constitution talks about creating post offices. It doesn&#8217;t say anything about closing.
Look at the people that most depend upon the Postal Service. They&#8217;re elderly people, disabled people, poor people and small business owners. They can&#8217;t afford the alternatives. What should be happening here is that the large businesses, who use the Postal Service to make tremendous profits, should be subsidizing the people who are dependent upon the Postal Service, as opposed to the other way around. The economy went in the dumper in 2008. That impacted upon business. That impacted upon the business of the Postal Service, as well. But the fact of the matter is, the only way you can say the Postal Service might have problems into the future, if you feel that the economy is never coming back, and I don&#8217;t know if that&#8217;s your position.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : Republican Representative Darrell Issa of California is co-sponsoring a bill that would allow the Postal Service to end Saturday mail deliveries, sell advertising space at post offices, and phase out most residential to the door deliveries in four years. The bill would also require postal workers to pay more toward retirement and healthcare benefits and establish a financial control board to overhaul postal finances. Representative Issa defended his bill on MSNBC&#8217;s Morning Joe .
DARRELL ISSA : What we&#8217;re looking at doing is giving the authority with a mandate to get to break even or a profit to the Postmaster and his governing board. That&#8217;s what our bill does. It&#8217;s why we want ours rather than a bailout. It&#8217;s why most of the major newspapers that have yet spoken, have spoken in favor of this bill, because it actually gets the Post Office back on the right track without any real loss of service, the service you expect whether you&#8217;re in New York City or on an island far in the north of Alaska.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : That was Republican Representative Darrell Issa of California. On Friday, Senator John McCain announced that he was introducing the Senate version of that same legislation. Chuck Zlatkin, your response?
CHUCK ZLATKIN : Well, there is a solution, and it&#8217;s in the House now. It&#8217;s HR 1351, which was introduced by Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts, which basically balances it out. You say we take it from the overpayment fund into the obligation fund, no cost to the taxpayer. It frees up this money. Right now, it has 215 co-sponsors, including a couple of dozen Republicans. Darrell Issa&#8217;s bill that he put in has one co-sponsor: his colleague from Florida, Dennis Ross.
I mean, we&#8217;re talking about a service to the American people. Let&#8217;s solve it and get on to the real problems that are impacting upon people right now. This is about breaking the union, privatizing the Postal Service, and taking away the service to the people, the universal service that everybody has a right to. That&#8217;s what this is about. It really isn&#8217;t about dealing with the future business of the Postal Service, because the Postal Service, all it needs is a chance to survive and thrive, and it will take care of business.
AMY GOODMAN : Gene Del Polito?
GENE DEL POLITO : Well, the nature of the debate that&#8217;s going on, and what people are seeking for resolutions, means that you have to go to Congress in order to be able to get the solution that you want done. Now, the moment you go to Congress and you start asking them for help, you have to start playing the game by their rules, and their rules will are pretty much dictated by the budgets that they create year after year. When you take a look at the Postal Service&#8217;s situation, sure, there has been an overpayment, but the problem that you run into is, as as soon as ask for the Treasury to begin to take money out and give it back to the Postal Service, the first question you&#8217;re asked up on the Hill is, &quot;And from whom shall I take this additional money in order to be able to make up for what I just gave back to the Postal Service?&quot; So it&#8217;s kind of like a no-win situation in which you have—again, there&#8217;s this fundamental disagreement over how to go about dealing with the issue.
Now, there is an easier way to be able to resolve this. And that is, if you&#8217;re worried about the Postal Service having to make payments for its obligations, why not also take into account that the Postal Service has a tremendous amount of real estate assets that could be pledged against those payments in the future? Most of the real estate assets that the Postal Service has on its books are carried at the prices in which they purchased them. If you actually did a real-market evaluation of what those properties are worth today, you would find they&#8217;re worth substantially more than they were at the time that they were purchased. And those assets can be pledged against any payments or liabilities the Postal Service has to make. The trouble is, no one wants to go to the more expedient solution, such as that, because what really is at play here is the contest over what&#8217;s going to be happening for the election of 2012.
AMY GOODMAN : Chuck Zlatkin?
CHUCK ZLATKIN : Well, what I&#8217;m saying—you go into a store or a restaurant, and they overcharge you, they don&#8217;t give you your change, you say to them, &quot;Wait a minute, you got to give me back my change.&quot; And they&#8217;ll say, &quot;Well, we don&#8217;t know where to take it from. Where do we get that money?&quot; You overcharge, you return the money. It&#8217;s a simple thing that anybody can understand. And it isn&#8217;t even real money, in this sense, because it&#8217;s just crediting against this future obligation, which was manufactured to destroy the Postal Service. Did you support the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006?
AMY GOODMAN : Gene Del Polito?
GENE DEL POLITO : No, I didn&#8217;t.
CHUCK ZLATKIN : Well, who did?
GENE DEL POLITO : No, I didn&#8217;t.
CHUCK ZLATKIN : Who did? Why did you oppose it? Did you oppose it, or you took no position?
GENE DEL POLITO : Are we talking off this issue?
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re on the air here, yeah. We&#8217;re talking about the act of 2006. Gene Del Polito?
CHUCK ZLATKIN : He said that he took no position—
GENE DEL POLITO : Yes—
CHUCK ZLATKIN : —on that act. Well, my union and the people we represented, we opposed it from the beginning, because we saw what was going to happen in our future, because it wasn&#8217;t just creating this arbitrary payment that had to be made. It limited the amount of debt that the Postal Service could use, and it also pegged any price increase to the Consumer Price Index. You put those things together, it was dooming the Postal Service. This is a manufactured crisis that was brought about by the same Congress that you&#8217;re saying that we shouldn&#8217;t go to to correct it. They caused the problem. We have to go to the cause of the problem and then come together and deal with this on behalf of the people who depend upon the Postal Service. As far as the union is concerned, if there&#8217;s service to the public, we&#8217;ll have jobs. We don&#8217;t have to manufacture jobs. The people who want to destroy the Postal Service had to manufacture a crisis.
AMY GOODMAN : Who wants to destroy the Post Office?
CHUCK ZLATKIN : Well, because they know it&#8217;s an essential business that&#8217;s a function that will have to take place anyway. The Postal Service in 2004 did $70 billion in business. In 2010, it did $67 billion in business. So what&#8217;s the tremendous drop in business? It&#8217;s only because there was a spike in &#39;05, &#8217;06, &#8217;07, because of the economy going up. The economy goes down, the Postal Service is impacted upon that. What we have to do is realize that it&#39;s a service that people depend upon. And also, in the middle of the recession, are you going to lay off 120,000 people?
And to accomplish this, you have to go to Congress to pass laws that will negate a contract that the Postmaster General, Patrick R. Donahoe, negotiated with the union in April. In July, he was going to Congress and saying we have to pass laws to break this contract. What happened between April and July? Absolutely nothing. If Donahoe did this contract, which was attacked by Issa, was so bad, why is Donahoe in his job now? He should have been fired. And/or at least if he was a decent guy, he should look at the situation and resign.
And we should also look into the sweetheart retirement package, filled with bonuses and pensions, that his predecessor, John E. Potter, got. If Potter left the Post Office in such a dire straits, why did he get these millions of dollars that was voted to him by the Postal Board of Governors? We need Donahoe out of his job and an investigation into what took place with the financial payoffs to his predecessor, and then we&#8217;ll be dealing with some of the real problems that the Postal Service is facing.
AMY GOODMAN : What about the effect of email on the Post Office?
CHUCK ZLATKIN : Well, obviously, there&#8217;s some kind of effect from email, that&#8217;s true.
AMY GOODMAN : Massive effect.
CHUCK ZLATKIN : But in 2006, it was the biggest volume that the Post Office ever handled in its 236-year history. And the years behind that were 2005 and 2007, well into the internet era. Yes, the nature of the business has changed. People aren&#8217;t writing letters to Grandma, but how are they getting their Netflix that they&#8217;re getting from their computer? It&#8217;s still being delivered by the Postal Service.
AMY GOODMAN : What about the role of unions? And do you think there is a role being played here, and the push for privatization?
CHUCK ZLATKIN : Well, the unions are an important factor, because part of the reason that it looks so good to privatize is, as they see this business and they&#8217;re saying, &quot;Look at this, we&#8217;re paying close to 600,000 workers a living wage, benefits and retirement package. Well, if we could break the union and eliminate that, we could bring in people, at-will workers for an hourly wage with no benefits, and that money could go to, not the American people or costs in government, that would go to profits. This is another situation where working-class people and poor people are being asked to suffer and sacrifice to benefit the rich.
AMY GOODMAN : Gene Del Polito, a final comment?
GENE DEL POLITO : My final comment would be, I can&#8217;t really argue with the man&#8217;s suppositions. His suppositions are his own. The fact of the matter is, is the nature of communicating and doing business in America has undergone substantial change. The Postal Service has lost its most profitable category of mail: first-class mail. It continues to decline. The Postal Service has too many facilities, too many workers, and an infrastructure which it finds impossible to support with the revenues that it takes in today. Clearly, what has to happen is its costs need to be realigned to be more realistic to be able to attend to what the needs are that the nation has and how to go about providing them.
AMY GOODMAN : Very quickly, if the Post Office goes the route of privatization, will the—private companies will be asking for subsidies to deal with, for example, rural areas in this country. And in the end, the U.S. taxpayers will continue to foot the bill, but this will be for private gain.
CHUCK ZLATKIN : Well, yeah, they&#8217;ll either ask for subsidies, or they&#8217;ll refuse to do it. Universal service will be doomed. They&#8217;ll pick and choose the profitable areas to service, and the rest of the people will have to fend for themselves. And I would just ask the people who are concerned about this to come out today to rally in every congressional district in the country. You can go to &quot;Save America&#8217;s Postal Service,&quot; saveamericaspostalservice.org and find out the location near you. This is about saving an institution for the people who depend upon it.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, I want to thank you both for being with us. Gene Del Polito, thank you for joining us from Washington, president of the Association for Postal Commerce in D.C., and Chuck Zlatkin, here in New York, legislative and political director of the New York Metro Area Postal Union. NERMEENSHAIKH: For months, Americans have heard dire warnings about the impending collapse of the United States Postal Service due to fiscal insolvency. Earlier this month, the U.S. Postmaster General, Patrick Donahoe, told Congress the USPS is close to default and unveiled a series of radical proposals to cut costs. Under Donahoe’s plan, the Postal Service would fire up to 120,000 workers, close several thousand facilities, scale back deliveries, and reduce benefits for retirees. Donahoe discussed his demands in an appearance on CNBC.

POSTMASTERGENERALPATRICKDONAHOE: We need Congress to act immediately. We’ve been asking them—we went over today, had a hearing before the Senate. We need them to do three things: give us the opportunity to resolve this prepayment issue, the $5.5 billion; let us move from six-day to five-day delivery; and give us a refund. We’ve overpaid one of our retirement funds by $6.9 billion. Those three things. We can take care of the rest of the issues we need to take care of ourselves.

NERMEENSHAIKH: But postal workers say the much-touted crisis facing the U.S. Postal Service isn’t what it seems. Rather, they point to a 2006 law that forced the USPS to find enough money to fund 75 years of retiree health benefits over just a 10-year span. The American Postal Workers Union says the law’s requirements account for 100 percent of the Service’s $20 billion in losses over the previous four years, without which the service would have turned a profit.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, today, postal workers and their supporters are holding events in every congressional district to press their demand for repealing the benefit-funding mandate. The events are part of a national day of action dubbed "Save America’s Postal Service." In addition to pushing for legislative changes, the postal workers are also pushing back against calls for their workplace to be privatized.

I’m joined now by two guests to debate this issue. Chuck Zlatkin is the legislative and political director of the New York Metro Area Postal Union. He’s joining us here in New York. And joining us from Washington, D.C., is Gene Del Polito. He’s president of the Association for Postal Commerce in Washington, D.C.

Gene Del Polito, what’s the problem with the U.S. Post Office today?

GENEDELPOLITO: Well, actually, it’s a combination of a couple of things. But the fact is, is that the people who are responsible for coming up with the solution to the Postal Service’s problems have very fundamental disagreements in terms of the way they actually see what the cause of the problem is or what the solutions are likely to be. But to put it simply, the Postal Service is operating under a significant burden in terms of what it has to fund for its postal retirees. But at the same time, so much mail has been leaving the postal system for electronic alternatives that it now looks as if the Postal Service’s ability to attain the kind of revenue targets it would have achieved in the past is just no longer possible.

AMYGOODMAN: Is this a real crisis, Chuck Zlatkin?

CHUCKZLATKIN: Well, it’s become a crisis, but we feel that it’s a manufactured crisis, because the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which my union opposed, which was supposed to prepare the Postal Service for the 21st century, has actually created this crisis.

AMYGOODMAN: Passed five years ago.

CHUCKZLATKIN: In 2006, five years—had created this crisis, because it mandated that the Postal Service, every September 30th, has to write a check from its operating funds—that’s the only place it could come from—for $5.5 billion to the U.S. Treasury to partially—it’s involved in fully pre-funding future retirees’ health benefits, for 75 years. You’re talking about funding the retirement benefits for people who haven’t even been born yet, let alone working in the Postal Service.

AMYGOODMAN: Wait, you have to explain this. Do other agencies have to do this?

CHUCKZLATKIN: No, no other agency, no other corporation, no organization that we know of is mandated by law to do this.

AMYGOODMAN: Gene Del Polito, what is the logic of this?

GENEDELPOLITO: Well, to be honest, I can’t quite figure out what the logic is, either. Actually, the logic stems from the fact that the people who were involved from the Bush administration in the creation of the Postal Accountability Act had little faith that the Postal Service was going to remain a sustaining organization and wanted to be absolutely sure that whatever provisions needed to be put into the law to ensure that the U.S. Treasury would not be left on the hook for any unfunded liabilities, that it would be taken care of.

NERMEENSHAIKH: Earlier this month, Gwen Ifill of PBS spoke with Fredric Rolando, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers. He insisted the U.S. Postal Service is not broke. Let’s go to that clip.

FREDERICROLANDO: During the last four fiscal years, the Postal Service, with the recession that we’ve been through, the worst recession in 80 years and the internet diversion, still showed an operational profit of almost $700 million during that period of time. The $20-plus billion that you read about in losses is nothing more than a congressional mandate that requires the Postal Service—required the Postal Service to take all of their cash and put it into a pre-funding account. The Postal Service actually has somewhere between $50 billion and $125 billion in their other funds that is not taxpayer money. They haven’t used a dime of taxpayer money in over 30 years. And the Congress just needs to act responsibly and quickly to give them access to those funds.

NERMEENSHAIKH: Gene Del Polito, your response?

GENEDELPOLITO: Well, there was a time when what Mr. Rolando said would have been true, and that is the Postal Service’s losses were generated exclusively by the prepayments that they were required to make. However, if you look at their financial sheets today, you’ll find that by the end of this fiscal year, which should be up in a couple of days, the Postal Service, even if they were forgiven all of their obligations, would still not have enough money to be able to operate within the black. The Postal Service also manages what it does by its cash flow, and according to their own chief financial officer’s best projections, it now looks as if the Postal Service is going to flat run out of cash by July 2012 if nothing is absolutely done. It’s also extending the amount of time that it’s giving the people that it has contracts with, to actually manufacture equipment and do things, to see if they can get a longer period of time for payment for them in order to be able to stretch its cash. But there’s no doubt about it: the Postal Service is in a fiscal fix, and just relieving the obligation alone is not going to be enough. There needs to be much, much more done.

AMYGOODMAN: Chuck Zlatkin?

CHUCKZLATKIN: Well, yes, there needs to be more done, but it’s not just relieving the future burdens. If the $25 billion is left to be paid into the future retiree health benefits plan, but if you got the money that was overpaid into the other fund, $50 billion is the low figure. So you pay off the future accountability requirements for the healthcare benefits, you pay down your debt, and then you use the excess money there to modernize, to develop things that bring more business, more people into the Postal Service. You have this extraordinary structure of places to do business, plants, trucks. Use it for the benefit of the American people. The Postal Service—it’s in the Constitution. Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 7 of the Constitution talks about creating post offices. It doesn’t say anything about closing.

Look at the people that most depend upon the Postal Service. They’re elderly people, disabled people, poor people and small business owners. They can’t afford the alternatives. What should be happening here is that the large businesses, who use the Postal Service to make tremendous profits, should be subsidizing the people who are dependent upon the Postal Service, as opposed to the other way around. The economy went in the dumper in 2008. That impacted upon business. That impacted upon the business of the Postal Service, as well. But the fact of the matter is, the only way you can say the Postal Service might have problems into the future, if you feel that the economy is never coming back, and I don’t know if that’s your position.

NERMEENSHAIKH: Republican Representative Darrell Issa of California is co-sponsoring a bill that would allow the Postal Service to end Saturday mail deliveries, sell advertising space at post offices, and phase out most residential to the door deliveries in four years. The bill would also require postal workers to pay more toward retirement and healthcare benefits and establish a financial control board to overhaul postal finances. Representative Issa defended his bill on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

DARRELLISSA: What we’re looking at doing is giving the authority with a mandate to get to break even or a profit to the Postmaster and his governing board. That’s what our bill does. It’s why we want ours rather than a bailout. It’s why most of the major newspapers that have yet spoken, have spoken in favor of this bill, because it actually gets the Post Office back on the right track without any real loss of service, the service you expect whether you’re in New York City or on an island far in the north of Alaska.

NERMEENSHAIKH: That was Republican Representative Darrell Issa of California. On Friday, Senator John McCain announced that he was introducing the Senate version of that same legislation. Chuck Zlatkin, your response?

CHUCKZLATKIN: Well, there is a solution, and it’s in the House now. It’s HR 1351, which was introduced by Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts, which basically balances it out. You say we take it from the overpayment fund into the obligation fund, no cost to the taxpayer. It frees up this money. Right now, it has 215 co-sponsors, including a couple of dozen Republicans. Darrell Issa’s bill that he put in has one co-sponsor: his colleague from Florida, Dennis Ross.

I mean, we’re talking about a service to the American people. Let’s solve it and get on to the real problems that are impacting upon people right now. This is about breaking the union, privatizing the Postal Service, and taking away the service to the people, the universal service that everybody has a right to. That’s what this is about. It really isn’t about dealing with the future business of the Postal Service, because the Postal Service, all it needs is a chance to survive and thrive, and it will take care of business.

AMYGOODMAN: Gene Del Polito?

GENEDELPOLITO: Well, the nature of the debate that’s going on, and what people are seeking for resolutions, means that you have to go to Congress in order to be able to get the solution that you want done. Now, the moment you go to Congress and you start asking them for help, you have to start playing the game by their rules, and their rules will are pretty much dictated by the budgets that they create year after year. When you take a look at the Postal Service’s situation, sure, there has been an overpayment, but the problem that you run into is, as as soon as ask for the Treasury to begin to take money out and give it back to the Postal Service, the first question you’re asked up on the Hill is, "And from whom shall I take this additional money in order to be able to make up for what I just gave back to the Postal Service?" So it’s kind of like a no-win situation in which you have—again, there’s this fundamental disagreement over how to go about dealing with the issue.

Now, there is an easier way to be able to resolve this. And that is, if you’re worried about the Postal Service having to make payments for its obligations, why not also take into account that the Postal Service has a tremendous amount of real estate assets that could be pledged against those payments in the future? Most of the real estate assets that the Postal Service has on its books are carried at the prices in which they purchased them. If you actually did a real-market evaluation of what those properties are worth today, you would find they’re worth substantially more than they were at the time that they were purchased. And those assets can be pledged against any payments or liabilities the Postal Service has to make. The trouble is, no one wants to go to the more expedient solution, such as that, because what really is at play here is the contest over what’s going to be happening for the election of 2012.

AMYGOODMAN: Chuck Zlatkin?

CHUCKZLATKIN: Well, what I’m saying—you go into a store or a restaurant, and they overcharge you, they don’t give you your change, you say to them, "Wait a minute, you got to give me back my change." And they’ll say, "Well, we don’t know where to take it from. Where do we get that money?" You overcharge, you return the money. It’s a simple thing that anybody can understand. And it isn’t even real money, in this sense, because it’s just crediting against this future obligation, which was manufactured to destroy the Postal Service. Did you support the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006?

AMYGOODMAN: Gene Del Polito?

GENEDELPOLITO: No, I didn’t.

CHUCKZLATKIN: Well, who did?

GENEDELPOLITO: No, I didn’t.

CHUCKZLATKIN: Who did? Why did you oppose it? Did you oppose it, or you took no position?

GENEDELPOLITO: Are we talking off this issue?

AMYGOODMAN: We’re on the air here, yeah. We’re talking about the act of 2006. Gene Del Polito?

CHUCKZLATKIN: He said that he took no position—

GENEDELPOLITO: Yes—

CHUCKZLATKIN: —on that act. Well, my union and the people we represented, we opposed it from the beginning, because we saw what was going to happen in our future, because it wasn’t just creating this arbitrary payment that had to be made. It limited the amount of debt that the Postal Service could use, and it also pegged any price increase to the Consumer Price Index. You put those things together, it was dooming the Postal Service. This is a manufactured crisis that was brought about by the same Congress that you’re saying that we shouldn’t go to to correct it. They caused the problem. We have to go to the cause of the problem and then come together and deal with this on behalf of the people who depend upon the Postal Service. As far as the union is concerned, if there’s service to the public, we’ll have jobs. We don’t have to manufacture jobs. The people who want to destroy the Postal Service had to manufacture a crisis.

AMYGOODMAN: Who wants to destroy the Post Office?

CHUCKZLATKIN: Well, because they know it’s an essential business that’s a function that will have to take place anyway. The Postal Service in 2004 did $70 billion in business. In 2010, it did $67 billion in business. So what’s the tremendous drop in business? It’s only because there was a spike in '05, ’06, ’07, because of the economy going up. The economy goes down, the Postal Service is impacted upon that. What we have to do is realize that it's a service that people depend upon. And also, in the middle of the recession, are you going to lay off 120,000 people?

And to accomplish this, you have to go to Congress to pass laws that will negate a contract that the Postmaster General, Patrick R. Donahoe, negotiated with the union in April. In July, he was going to Congress and saying we have to pass laws to break this contract. What happened between April and July? Absolutely nothing. If Donahoe did this contract, which was attacked by Issa, was so bad, why is Donahoe in his job now? He should have been fired. And/or at least if he was a decent guy, he should look at the situation and resign.

And we should also look into the sweetheart retirement package, filled with bonuses and pensions, that his predecessor, John E. Potter, got. If Potter left the Post Office in such a dire straits, why did he get these millions of dollars that was voted to him by the Postal Board of Governors? We need Donahoe out of his job and an investigation into what took place with the financial payoffs to his predecessor, and then we’ll be dealing with some of the real problems that the Postal Service is facing.

CHUCKZLATKIN: But in 2006, it was the biggest volume that the Post Office ever handled in its 236-year history. And the years behind that were 2005 and 2007, well into the internet era. Yes, the nature of the business has changed. People aren’t writing letters to Grandma, but how are they getting their Netflix that they’re getting from their computer? It’s still being delivered by the Postal Service.

AMYGOODMAN: What about the role of unions? And do you think there is a role being played here, and the push for privatization?

CHUCKZLATKIN: Well, the unions are an important factor, because part of the reason that it looks so good to privatize is, as they see this business and they’re saying, "Look at this, we’re paying close to 600,000 workers a living wage, benefits and retirement package. Well, if we could break the union and eliminate that, we could bring in people, at-will workers for an hourly wage with no benefits, and that money could go to, not the American people or costs in government, that would go to profits. This is another situation where working-class people and poor people are being asked to suffer and sacrifice to benefit the rich.

AMYGOODMAN: Gene Del Polito, a final comment?

GENEDELPOLITO: My final comment would be, I can’t really argue with the man’s suppositions. His suppositions are his own. The fact of the matter is, is the nature of communicating and doing business in America has undergone substantial change. The Postal Service has lost its most profitable category of mail: first-class mail. It continues to decline. The Postal Service has too many facilities, too many workers, and an infrastructure which it finds impossible to support with the revenues that it takes in today. Clearly, what has to happen is its costs need to be realigned to be more realistic to be able to attend to what the needs are that the nation has and how to go about providing them.

AMYGOODMAN: Very quickly, if the Post Office goes the route of privatization, will the—private companies will be asking for subsidies to deal with, for example, rural areas in this country. And in the end, the U.S. taxpayers will continue to foot the bill, but this will be for private gain.

CHUCKZLATKIN: Well, yeah, they’ll either ask for subsidies, or they’ll refuse to do it. Universal service will be doomed. They’ll pick and choose the profitable areas to service, and the rest of the people will have to fend for themselves. And I would just ask the people who are concerned about this to come out today to rally in every congressional district in the country. You can go to "Save America’s Postal Service," saveamericaspostalservice.org and find out the location near you. This is about saving an institution for the people who depend upon it.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us. Gene Del Polito, thank you for joining us from Washington, president of the Association for Postal Commerce in D.C., and Chuck Zlatkin, here in New York, legislative and political director of the New York Metro Area Postal Union.

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Tue, 27 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400Occupy Wall Street Protest Enters Second Week; 80 Arrested at Peaceful Marchhttp://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/26/occupy_wall_street_protest_enters_second
tag:democracynow.org,2011-09-26:en/story/b5ab49 AMY GOODMAN : Yes, it&#8217;s day 10 of the Occupy Wall Street campaign. On Saturday, more than 80 protesters were arrested as hundreds took part in yet another march to Wall Street. The New York Police Department used nets and physical force to break up the crowds. Videos uploaded to YouTube show officers pepper-spraying protesters in the face from close range, punching demonstrators and dragging people through the street.
Since Saturday, September 17th, thousands, inspired by popular uprisings from Spain to the Arab Spring, gathered near Wall Street to decry corporate greed. On Sunday, protesters issued a communiqué calling for the resignation of the New York police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, and a dialogue with Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Ryan Devereaux and Jon Gerberg of Democracy Now! were in the streets talking to people about what took place.
NATHAN SCHNEIDER : There were some arrests down in the Wall Street area, including someone from the media team, around Fifth Avenue and 12th Street. There was a mass arrest. As many as a hundred, perhaps around a hundred, were taken in, in police vans, in city buses. And then those who remained came down. There were reports of pepper spray being used, people being dragged around on the ground by their hair. The witness reports are still coming in.
YELL : My name is Yell. This one police officer had whipped out his mace and sprayed it about a foot away from me and around my area, where there were other people. The mace at that point was so close to me that it was dripping down my face, down my chest, all over me. It was ridiculous. I was about maybe 45 to an hour—I was blind for about 45 minutes to an hour. I&#8217;m not going anywhere. I&#8217;m not going anywhere. They need to do a lot more to move me.
CHRISTINA GONZALEZ : My name is Christina Gonzales. I&#8217;m from Far Rockaway, Queens. Today I was involved in the protest. I was actually arrested. The guy told me to stop filming. I told him I wasn&#8217;t, and I heard him say, &quot;Get her!&quot; The next thing you know, they all came up behind me. They grabbed me by my wrist. They took their feet and swept it under my feet to try to take my feet from under me. They put the cuffs on really tight. I could not feel my hands. And all I kept doing was screaming, &quot;Please get these cuffs off of me! Get these cuffs off of me! I cannot breathe! I&#8217;m suffocating! My hands!&quot;
We sat inside one of these police vans, 16 of us, for two-and-a-half hours with the doors closed. We couldn&#8217;t breath in there, and there was a man in there who needed medical attention. He had a big, huge laceration on his eyebrow. There were a couple other brothers who had scrapes on their leg, big cuts into their leg. And everybody was just laughing at us. The cops kept circling around. We asked for water. No water. We had our phones. We were sending pictures; we were making phone calls. We even called 911, and 911 said, &quot;You&#8217;re with the cops, they&#8217;re there to protect you,&quot; and she hung up the phone on me.
There&#8217;s a lot of—there&#8217;s a lot of causes out here, but I think the main thing that we&#8217;re looking for is that we&#8217;re human beings, and human beings should come before money. Human beings should come before profit. There&#8217;s a lot of greed out here, and a lot of people don&#8217;t have things, and there&#8217;s a few small people who do have it, and they&#8217;re keeping it from us. And they&#8217;ve got the cops out here to protect them, and they should be out here protecting us, you know? That&#8217;s why we&#8217;re out here, because there&#8217;s injustice going on. And everybody wants to know, what&#8217;s our cause, what&#8217;s our cause? Listen, this is not just a protest. This is a struggle. It&#8217;s a fight. It&#8217;s a war going on. And we&#8217;re fighting a peaceful war.
WYLIE STECKLOW : I believe, as a constitutional lawyer, that the actual act of being here, of doing two general assemblies a day, of doing two marches a day, and of trying to have this peaceful assembly, putting out cardboard signs that other individuals will come around and see, this whole act is expressive speech. This is the First Amendment. It&#8217;s a living, breathing moment of the First Amendment in action and something that I don&#8217;t recall really seeing quite like this before.
NATHAN SCHNEIDER : What they&#8217;re doing here is the assembly. The core demand, I think, right now, seems to be the right to organize, to have a political conversation in a public space, to show Wall Street, so to speak, what democracy looks like.
AMY GOODMAN That was Nathan Schneider, editor of the website wagingnonviolence.org . He talked about the protest over the last 10 days.
NATHAN SCHNEIDER : This protest began on Saturday with a rally down near Bowling Green and then a march up to a surprise location, which turned out to be Liberty Plaza. Since then, people began spending the night, that first night. Every day since, there have been interactions with the police, generally including arrests. There&#8217;s been a lot of frustration about media coverage. But what matters more is that this group is learning the skills that are necessary in order to build that kind of coverage and build that kind of presence in the media.
HENRY JAMES FERRY : My name is Henry James Ferry. The media center is a—it&#8217;s a varied group. It&#8217;s made up of people who are live streaming through a handle of &quot;Global Revolution.&quot; It&#8217;s made up of people like me, who are tweeting from &quot;The Other 99.&quot; That&#8217;s my handle, &quot;The Other 99.&quot; I also have a Facebook account that&#8217;s putting up the list of our media events at &quot;We are the Other 99.&quot; And we want to be a primary source of information. This is day eight of the occupation. We want to create a narrative that the media can use to tell this story. Right now, this is a very messy, disconjointed story, and I don&#8217;t think the media knows how to cover it. We&#8217;re trying to create that narrative so that they have primary information, sourced with pictures, with video, with sources that they can trust, so they can go out and tell the message to the whole country and the whole world.
AMY GOODMAN For more on Occupy Wall Street, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. And organizers in Los Angeles have now just announced an Occupy Los Angeles campaign. AMYGOODMAN: Yes, it’s day 10 of the Occupy Wall Street campaign. On Saturday, more than 80 protesters were arrested as hundreds took part in yet another march to Wall Street. The New York Police Department used nets and physical force to break up the crowds. Videos uploaded to YouTube show officers pepper-spraying protesters in the face from close range, punching demonstrators and dragging people through the street.

Since Saturday, September 17th, thousands, inspired by popular uprisings from Spain to the Arab Spring, gathered near Wall Street to decry corporate greed. On Sunday, protesters issued a communiqué calling for the resignation of the New York police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, and a dialogue with Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Ryan Devereaux and Jon Gerberg of Democracy Now! were in the streets talking to people about what took place.

NATHANSCHNEIDER: There were some arrests down in the Wall Street area, including someone from the media team, around Fifth Avenue and 12th Street. There was a mass arrest. As many as a hundred, perhaps around a hundred, were taken in, in police vans, in city buses. And then those who remained came down. There were reports of pepper spray being used, people being dragged around on the ground by their hair. The witness reports are still coming in.

YELL: My name is Yell. This one police officer had whipped out his mace and sprayed it about a foot away from me and around my area, where there were other people. The mace at that point was so close to me that it was dripping down my face, down my chest, all over me. It was ridiculous. I was about maybe 45 to an hour—I was blind for about 45 minutes to an hour. I’m not going anywhere. I’m not going anywhere. They need to do a lot more to move me.

CHRISTINAGONZALEZ: My name is Christina Gonzales. I’m from Far Rockaway, Queens. Today I was involved in the protest. I was actually arrested. The guy told me to stop filming. I told him I wasn’t, and I heard him say, "Get her!" The next thing you know, they all came up behind me. They grabbed me by my wrist. They took their feet and swept it under my feet to try to take my feet from under me. They put the cuffs on really tight. I could not feel my hands. And all I kept doing was screaming, "Please get these cuffs off of me! Get these cuffs off of me! I cannot breathe! I’m suffocating! My hands!"

We sat inside one of these police vans, 16 of us, for two-and-a-half hours with the doors closed. We couldn’t breath in there, and there was a man in there who needed medical attention. He had a big, huge laceration on his eyebrow. There were a couple other brothers who had scrapes on their leg, big cuts into their leg. And everybody was just laughing at us. The cops kept circling around. We asked for water. No water. We had our phones. We were sending pictures; we were making phone calls. We even called 911, and 911 said, "You’re with the cops, they’re there to protect you," and she hung up the phone on me.

There’s a lot of—there’s a lot of causes out here, but I think the main thing that we’re looking for is that we’re human beings, and human beings should come before money. Human beings should come before profit. There’s a lot of greed out here, and a lot of people don’t have things, and there’s a few small people who do have it, and they’re keeping it from us. And they’ve got the cops out here to protect them, and they should be out here protecting us, you know? That’s why we’re out here, because there’s injustice going on. And everybody wants to know, what’s our cause, what’s our cause? Listen, this is not just a protest. This is a struggle. It’s a fight. It’s a war going on. And we’re fighting a peaceful war.

WYLIESTECKLOW: I believe, as a constitutional lawyer, that the actual act of being here, of doing two general assemblies a day, of doing two marches a day, and of trying to have this peaceful assembly, putting out cardboard signs that other individuals will come around and see, this whole act is expressive speech. This is the First Amendment. It’s a living, breathing moment of the First Amendment in action and something that I don’t recall really seeing quite like this before.

NATHANSCHNEIDER: What they’re doing here is the assembly. The core demand, I think, right now, seems to be the right to organize, to have a political conversation in a public space, to show Wall Street, so to speak, what democracy looks like.

AMYGOODMAN That was Nathan Schneider, editor of the website wagingnonviolence.org. He talked about the protest over the last 10 days.

NATHANSCHNEIDER: This protest began on Saturday with a rally down near Bowling Green and then a march up to a surprise location, which turned out to be Liberty Plaza. Since then, people began spending the night, that first night. Every day since, there have been interactions with the police, generally including arrests. There’s been a lot of frustration about media coverage. But what matters more is that this group is learning the skills that are necessary in order to build that kind of coverage and build that kind of presence in the media.

HENRYJAMESFERRY: My name is Henry James Ferry. The media center is a—it’s a varied group. It’s made up of people who are live streaming through a handle of "Global Revolution." It’s made up of people like me, who are tweeting from "The Other 99." That’s my handle, "The Other 99." I also have a Facebook account that’s putting up the list of our media events at "We are the Other 99." And we want to be a primary source of information. This is day eight of the occupation. We want to create a narrative that the media can use to tell this story. Right now, this is a very messy, disconjointed story, and I don’t think the media knows how to cover it. We’re trying to create that narrative so that they have primary information, sourced with pictures, with video, with sources that they can trust, so they can go out and tell the message to the whole country and the whole world.

AMYGOODMAN For more on Occupy Wall Street, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. And organizers in Los Angeles have now just announced an Occupy Los Angeles campaign.

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Mon, 26 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400Author Ron Suskind on Obama's Evolution amidst Unprecedented Economic and International Challengeshttp://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/9/23/author_ron_suskind_on_obamas_evolution_amidst_unprecedented_economic_and_international_challenges
tag:democracynow.org,2011-09-23:blog/1368d2 In part two of our interview with veteran journalist Ron Suskind about his explosive new book, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President , Suskind discusses the challenges faced by President Obama and his evolution as a leader. &quot;You see the President grappling...to try to get his arms around what is often an untenable situation,&quot; says Suskind. &quot;He has a team around him with long Washington experience and long histories with one another. The President, meanwhile, is ramping up at Mach speed on very difficult, and often very complex, national issues, economic issues, for which there is no recent precedent.&quot; According to Suskind, Obama muses he has &quot;policy wonk&#8217;s disease&quot; and now aims to be more dynamic in telling the American people &quot;who we are and where we’re going.&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : Ron Suskind is our guest. Let&#8217;s continue for a few more minutes with this conversation. Juan?
JUAN GONZALEZ : Well, Ron, I wanted to ask you about the—the thrust of the book is the green nature of Obama, especially when it comes to administration and administering the White House. How did you see his growth throughout that period? What&#8217;s changed from those early days?
RON SUSKIND : You know, I think it&#8217;s—it&#8217;s really what the book&#8217;s about. It&#8217;s about the growth of this man. And we&#8217;re interested in the advisers, as always, as I am with all of the books. And I think other writers would agree, not so much as to who the advisers are and what they do, but as to the glimpse they give of the central actor, the president. That&#8217;s why we always like to hear about White House advisers. And in this case, what you see is the President grappling, often with great might, to try to get his arms around what is often an untenable situation. He has a team around him with long Washington experience and long histories with one another. The President, meanwhile, is ramping up at Mach speed on very difficult, and often very complex, national issues, economic issues, for which there is no recent precedent. Meanwhile, he has—the fact of the matter is, it would take, you know, a manager of the utmost skill to manage Larry Summers, much less Larry Summers and Rahm Emanuel together. The President, who really had been mostly managing his one-man Barack Obama narrative and journey his whole life, without executive experience, certainly—he&#8217;s not a governor. Some governors, of course, they have experience in executing power, which is something fairly unique, actually, in government. And he has, neither, a set of nourishing experiences.
What he finds, going forward, is that he finds the gremlins pop up in a lot of different areas. In some cases, he sort of—he says at one point—I think it&#8217;s sort of telling—he knows he&#8217;s a great, you know, orator. And everyone does. But he&#8217;s frustrated that there&#8217;s not a follow-up to the speeches, that the speeches happen, and there&#8217;s great acclaim, but there&#8217;s not a policy follow-up to the speeches. This is something that frustrates him. Prior to the healthcare speech, after several incidents where he says we didn&#8217;t follow up, he is very, very pointed about &quot;I want&quot; — this is the September 2009 speech on healthcare before the joint session, a crucial speech of his first year — &quot;I want a fully realized healthcare plan, our proposal, out as I give this speech. I&#8217;m going to give the speech, and we&#8217;re going to pass out that proposal.&quot; The President is very focused on this. He, of course, is also writing this speech at high speed. And right coming up until the speech, he is convinced that a full plan, letter and verse of what the administration wants, will be released. In a meeting just prior to the speech, there&#8217;s debate about this. Dan Pfeiffer, Peter Orszag and others think that what&#8217;s now, you know, being proffered, which is a two-page thing of bullet points—the President doesn&#8217;t realize this—is wrong. The President says in this meeting, &quot;We&#8217;re going to release the speech.&quot; Orszag says no—you know, he wants—begins to say, &quot;No, it&#8217;s bullet points.&quot; And he recalls Emanuel gives him the &quot;don&#8217;t say another word&quot; look. Now, I talked to Rahm about this. He says, you know, &quot;I don&#8217;t think that comports with my memory. I would never keep things from the President.&quot; But the fact of the matter is, there are many instances in which those at the uppermost levels of the White House were feeling the President was not fully informed of the flow of events and, in some cases, where policies were going in the White House.
Now, finally, I think now, and importantly, the President has—after this memo was written, he, step by step, tried and did take control of the building. Almost everyone from that first period left, certainly in 2010, from February forward, one after the other, all the way up to Rahm Emanuel in September of the year. Pete Rouse moves in as the interim chief of staff. And starting in November—and the President talks about this with great energy in the interview—the President says, &quot;I have the staff I need.&quot; He felt he did the tax cut deal on the Bush tax cuts, attached the payroll tax cut, which he said was very strong stimulus. He feels emboldened in a way that I think it&#8217;s clear he did not feel before. &quot;I&#8217;ve got this under control. This White House is expressing my will.&quot; The Tucson speech with Gabby Giffords, all the way through. That&#8217;s where the book ends: the President feeling like he&#8217;s got this together.
JUAN GONZALEZ : But isn&#8217;t that, to some degree, those failings, his responsibility vis-à-vis the promise that he gave to all those people who ran for him? Remember, he&#8217;d constantly say, if you bring back the same people to Washington, you&#8217;re going to get the same results. So, he was the change, and yet he brought in all these same people from the Clinton administration to do a lot of his key work.
RON SUSKIND : Yeah, there&#8217;s no doubt that the questions of why he made those choices, what he was thinking, are ones that people ask. They&#8217;ve been asking it from the beginning, pointing out just what you said, Juan. The President, I think if you look at it from his shoes, you know, was facing a very difficult situation where he had to own Washington, tame New York, save a collapsing economy, with a collapsed financial system. He moved, I think, to a team that he felt was tried and true, in terms of dealing with financial crisis. That was his decision.
Going forward, I think he says something interesting in the final interview, where he talks about this experience has been one in which he has learned hard lessons, that he does not want to be legislator-in-chief—that&#8217;s past. He talked about technocratic solutions and his inclination in those directions being not sufficient to the job of president. He says at one point, &quot;Carter, Clinton and I suffer from,&quot; what he called, &quot;the policy wonk&#8217;s disease.&quot; And he feels like, again in February of this year, he&#8217;s shucking that off to be a president who&#8217;s more dynamic, more in control and larger in purpose, and most importantly, being able to tell a story, as he says, to the American people about who we are and where we&#8217;re going, which, he says, is something only a president can do.
AMY GOODMAN : I think why people are so concerned right now—who we are and where we&#8217;re going—cutting Social Security, cutting Medicare, cutting Medicaid, caving to those in the very right of the Republican Party, not even those in the center of the Republican Party, and not responding to the progressive base, right until now. What was—did Obama have to say about that?
RON SUSKIND : Well, you know, I didn&#8217;t get into where you stand politically in the interview. We kept it as to his evolution, what he&#8217;s learned, essentially, as the boss, as the leader. I think that he does say something that&#8217;s—that is telling on that score, when he talks about the Bush tax cuts and the swap he makes after the midterm elections, which is he doesn&#8217;t agree with the Bush tax cuts. He used it to make a swap for the stimulus. But he says that he thinks America felt better, more confident, because Washington was not simply in a gridlock, in stasis, where nothing was being done. And he talks about that as a positive. That is part of, I think, what he would term his evolution. The question is, is that really telegraphing where he will go from here.
AMY GOODMAN : Women meeting with him en masse in the White House to confront President Obama about the senior White House male advisers.
RON SUSKIND : Yes. In the dinner, in the residence, in November of 2009—and this dinner, mind you, has been—this is not the first time it&#8217;s been reported. It was in Jonathan Alter&#8217;s book. It was in Richard Wolff&#8217;s book. They all had a rendering of this scene. I have a rendering with some additional parts, certainly.
I think the thing that is striking about it—two things come to mind. One of Valerie Jarrett walking in—Valerie also, I interviewed for the book—and Anita Dunn were concerned, Valerie especially, that the women would not speak openly to the President. And Anita recalled that Valerie said to her, &quot;I want you to start, Anita,&quot; because Anita is a very forceful character, as I think people now know. &quot;And you start to get the rest moving.&quot; That wasn&#8217;t necessary. The women were free and frank and quite open with the President. And as their comments built, it seemed to coalesce that they were pointed, at least significantly, at Larry Summers and Rahm Emanuel. Both of them are brusque personalities, well known. Some would say they&#8217;re equal opportunity bullies. But the fact is, the women felt their behavior was inappropriate.
At the end of the dinner, the President says, &quot;I hear you. I am sympathetic to what you&#8217;re facing. But I really need these guys,&quot; because the women seemed to suggest that either one or both of them should be fired. The President says, &quot;Yes, yes, I understand, but I really need Rahm and Larry.&quot; Now, some of the women, I think, felt a little deflated from that, that, well, maybe they thought there would be more dramatic action or that maybe the President would take those two senior aides to the woodshed, so to speak. And that, again, is part of the flow of events.
After the meeting, though, things moved forward, and I think expressing their grievances to the President—he&#8217;s the leader of the free world, he&#8217;s very busy; this is something that&#8217;s usually handled by a chief of staff, but Emanuel being at the center of it made that a problem—I think it gave a kind of forward motion. It created a kind of forward motion to this issue, brought it out into the open, and probably created valuable benefits.
AMY GOODMAN : And, of course, Larry Summers was partly forced out of Harvard as president because of his attitude toward women, among the other controversies there, saying women can&#8217;t do science as well as men.
RON SUSKIND : That&#8217;s right.
AMY GOODMAN : Your most—your greatest shock in doing this, what you felt were the most explosive issues, as we sum up. And I know you have to leave for a CNN interview.
RON SUSKIND : Yeah. I think the issue that&#8217;s hardest to reckon with is not just how the President was racing to ramp up, to take control of his building, to do what he needs to do, but the awful combination of circumstances, of the President arriving with so little experience in this way but such demonstrative and demonstrable gifts, if you will, having to get all of this right very quickly, because that&#8217;s the moment of opportunity, in those first few months. And I think that it&#8217;s indisputable now, looking back, and I think the President would agree, that maybe an opportunity then was lost, as many point out, to restructure, as people have talked about in the last two days of this financial sort of up and down, where everybody is pulling their hair out, to restructure the way credit flows in America and the wider global economy, so that we don&#8217;t have this fear and fragility that causes these eruptions, eruptions and ups and downs, that often actually carry ill effects for the wider economy by virtue of people not having confidence to invest, to feel like the landscape will be sound and solid going forward. I think that&#8217;s really the missed opportunity of this period. He may make up for it now. I don&#8217;t think he has any lack of understanding of these things. And so, I think part of the issue, as we look forward—this book brings us up to present—is what now will the President do? Now that I think readers know him better, know why he did what he did, what was happening, they&#8217;ll have a better understanding of what he may do in the future and an understanding of what it means when he does act in the future. And I think that&#8217;s part of the goal of the book.
AMY GOODMAN : Ron Suskind, thanks so much for being with us. Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President , that is the title of the book.
In part two of our interview with veteran journalist Ron Suskind about his explosive new book, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President, Suskind discusses the challenges faced by President Obama and his evolution as a leader. "You see the President grappling...to try to get his arms around what is often an untenable situation," says Suskind. "He has a team around him with long Washington experience and long histories with one another. The President, meanwhile, is ramping up at Mach speed on very difficult, and often very complex, national issues, economic issues, for which there is no recent precedent." According to Suskind, Obama muses he has "policy wonk’s disease" and now aims to be more dynamic in telling the American people "who we are and where we’re going."

AMYGOODMAN: Ron Suskind is our guest. Let’s continue for a few more minutes with this conversation. Juan?

JUANGONZALEZ: Well, Ron, I wanted to ask you about the—the thrust of the book is the green nature of Obama, especially when it comes to administration and administering the White House. How did you see his growth throughout that period? What’s changed from those early days?

RONSUSKIND: You know, I think it’s—it’s really what the book’s about. It’s about the growth of this man. And we’re interested in the advisers, as always, as I am with all of the books. And I think other writers would agree, not so much as to who the advisers are and what they do, but as to the glimpse they give of the central actor, the president. That’s why we always like to hear about White House advisers. And in this case, what you see is the President grappling, often with great might, to try to get his arms around what is often an untenable situation. He has a team around him with long Washington experience and long histories with one another. The President, meanwhile, is ramping up at Mach speed on very difficult, and often very complex, national issues, economic issues, for which there is no recent precedent. Meanwhile, he has—the fact of the matter is, it would take, you know, a manager of the utmost skill to manage Larry Summers, much less Larry Summers and Rahm Emanuel together. The President, who really had been mostly managing his one-man Barack Obama narrative and journey his whole life, without executive experience, certainly—he’s not a governor. Some governors, of course, they have experience in executing power, which is something fairly unique, actually, in government. And he has, neither, a set of nourishing experiences.

What he finds, going forward, is that he finds the gremlins pop up in a lot of different areas. In some cases, he sort of—he says at one point—I think it’s sort of telling—he knows he’s a great, you know, orator. And everyone does. But he’s frustrated that there’s not a follow-up to the speeches, that the speeches happen, and there’s great acclaim, but there’s not a policy follow-up to the speeches. This is something that frustrates him. Prior to the healthcare speech, after several incidents where he says we didn’t follow up, he is very, very pointed about "I want" — this is the September 2009 speech on healthcare before the joint session, a crucial speech of his first year — "I want a fully realized healthcare plan, our proposal, out as I give this speech. I’m going to give the speech, and we’re going to pass out that proposal." The President is very focused on this. He, of course, is also writing this speech at high speed. And right coming up until the speech, he is convinced that a full plan, letter and verse of what the administration wants, will be released. In a meeting just prior to the speech, there’s debate about this. Dan Pfeiffer, Peter Orszag and others think that what’s now, you know, being proffered, which is a two-page thing of bullet points—the President doesn’t realize this—is wrong. The President says in this meeting, "We’re going to release the speech." Orszag says no—you know, he wants—begins to say, "No, it’s bullet points." And he recalls Emanuel gives him the "don’t say another word" look. Now, I talked to Rahm about this. He says, you know, "I don’t think that comports with my memory. I would never keep things from the President." But the fact of the matter is, there are many instances in which those at the uppermost levels of the White House were feeling the President was not fully informed of the flow of events and, in some cases, where policies were going in the White House.

Now, finally, I think now, and importantly, the President has—after this memo was written, he, step by step, tried and did take control of the building. Almost everyone from that first period left, certainly in 2010, from February forward, one after the other, all the way up to Rahm Emanuel in September of the year. Pete Rouse moves in as the interim chief of staff. And starting in November—and the President talks about this with great energy in the interview—the President says, "I have the staff I need." He felt he did the tax cut deal on the Bush tax cuts, attached the payroll tax cut, which he said was very strong stimulus. He feels emboldened in a way that I think it’s clear he did not feel before. "I’ve got this under control. This White House is expressing my will." The Tucson speech with Gabby Giffords, all the way through. That’s where the book ends: the President feeling like he’s got this together.

JUANGONZALEZ: But isn’t that, to some degree, those failings, his responsibility vis-à-vis the promise that he gave to all those people who ran for him? Remember, he’d constantly say, if you bring back the same people to Washington, you’re going to get the same results. So, he was the change, and yet he brought in all these same people from the Clinton administration to do a lot of his key work.

RONSUSKIND: Yeah, there’s no doubt that the questions of why he made those choices, what he was thinking, are ones that people ask. They’ve been asking it from the beginning, pointing out just what you said, Juan. The President, I think if you look at it from his shoes, you know, was facing a very difficult situation where he had to own Washington, tame New York, save a collapsing economy, with a collapsed financial system. He moved, I think, to a team that he felt was tried and true, in terms of dealing with financial crisis. That was his decision.

Going forward, I think he says something interesting in the final interview, where he talks about this experience has been one in which he has learned hard lessons, that he does not want to be legislator-in-chief—that’s past. He talked about technocratic solutions and his inclination in those directions being not sufficient to the job of president. He says at one point, "Carter, Clinton and I suffer from," what he called, "the policy wonk’s disease." And he feels like, again in February of this year, he’s shucking that off to be a president who’s more dynamic, more in control and larger in purpose, and most importantly, being able to tell a story, as he says, to the American people about who we are and where we’re going, which, he says, is something only a president can do.

AMYGOODMAN: I think why people are so concerned right now—who we are and where we’re going—cutting Social Security, cutting Medicare, cutting Medicaid, caving to those in the very right of the Republican Party, not even those in the center of the Republican Party, and not responding to the progressive base, right until now. What was—did Obama have to say about that?

RONSUSKIND: Well, you know, I didn’t get into where you stand politically in the interview. We kept it as to his evolution, what he’s learned, essentially, as the boss, as the leader. I think that he does say something that’s—that is telling on that score, when he talks about the Bush tax cuts and the swap he makes after the midterm elections, which is he doesn’t agree with the Bush tax cuts. He used it to make a swap for the stimulus. But he says that he thinks America felt better, more confident, because Washington was not simply in a gridlock, in stasis, where nothing was being done. And he talks about that as a positive. That is part of, I think, what he would term his evolution. The question is, is that really telegraphing where he will go from here.

AMYGOODMAN: Women meeting with him en masse in the White House to confront President Obama about the senior White House male advisers.

RONSUSKIND: Yes. In the dinner, in the residence, in November of 2009—and this dinner, mind you, has been—this is not the first time it’s been reported. It was in Jonathan Alter’s book. It was in Richard Wolff’s book. They all had a rendering of this scene. I have a rendering with some additional parts, certainly.

I think the thing that is striking about it—two things come to mind. One of Valerie Jarrett walking in—Valerie also, I interviewed for the book—and Anita Dunn were concerned, Valerie especially, that the women would not speak openly to the President. And Anita recalled that Valerie said to her, "I want you to start, Anita," because Anita is a very forceful character, as I think people now know. "And you start to get the rest moving." That wasn’t necessary. The women were free and frank and quite open with the President. And as their comments built, it seemed to coalesce that they were pointed, at least significantly, at Larry Summers and Rahm Emanuel. Both of them are brusque personalities, well known. Some would say they’re equal opportunity bullies. But the fact is, the women felt their behavior was inappropriate.

At the end of the dinner, the President says, "I hear you. I am sympathetic to what you’re facing. But I really need these guys," because the women seemed to suggest that either one or both of them should be fired. The President says, "Yes, yes, I understand, but I really need Rahm and Larry." Now, some of the women, I think, felt a little deflated from that, that, well, maybe they thought there would be more dramatic action or that maybe the President would take those two senior aides to the woodshed, so to speak. And that, again, is part of the flow of events.

After the meeting, though, things moved forward, and I think expressing their grievances to the President—he’s the leader of the free world, he’s very busy; this is something that’s usually handled by a chief of staff, but Emanuel being at the center of it made that a problem—I think it gave a kind of forward motion. It created a kind of forward motion to this issue, brought it out into the open, and probably created valuable benefits.

AMYGOODMAN: And, of course, Larry Summers was partly forced out of Harvard as president because of his attitude toward women, among the other controversies there, saying women can’t do science as well as men.

RONSUSKIND: That’s right.

AMYGOODMAN: Your most—your greatest shock in doing this, what you felt were the most explosive issues, as we sum up. And I know you have to leave for a CNN interview.

RONSUSKIND: Yeah. I think the issue that’s hardest to reckon with is not just how the President was racing to ramp up, to take control of his building, to do what he needs to do, but the awful combination of circumstances, of the President arriving with so little experience in this way but such demonstrative and demonstrable gifts, if you will, having to get all of this right very quickly, because that’s the moment of opportunity, in those first few months. And I think that it’s indisputable now, looking back, and I think the President would agree, that maybe an opportunity then was lost, as many point out, to restructure, as people have talked about in the last two days of this financial sort of up and down, where everybody is pulling their hair out, to restructure the way credit flows in America and the wider global economy, so that we don’t have this fear and fragility that causes these eruptions, eruptions and ups and downs, that often actually carry ill effects for the wider economy by virtue of people not having confidence to invest, to feel like the landscape will be sound and solid going forward. I think that’s really the missed opportunity of this period. He may make up for it now. I don’t think he has any lack of understanding of these things. And so, I think part of the issue, as we look forward—this book brings us up to present—is what now will the President do? Now that I think readers know him better, know why he did what he did, what was happening, they’ll have a better understanding of what he may do in the future and an understanding of what it means when he does act in the future. And I think that’s part of the goal of the book.

AMYGOODMAN: Ron Suskind, thanks so much for being with us. Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President, that is the title of the book.

]]>
Fri, 23 Sep 2011 11:05:00 -0400Author Ron Suskind on Obama's Evolution amidst Unprecedented Economic and International Challenges In part two of our interview with veteran journalist Ron Suskind about his explosive new book, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President , Suskind discusses the challenges faced by President Obama and his evolution as a leader. &quot;You see the President grappling...to try to get his arms around what is often an untenable situation,&quot; says Suskind. &quot;He has a team around him with long Washington experience and long histories with one another. The President, meanwhile, is ramping up at Mach speed on very difficult, and often very complex, national issues, economic issues, for which there is no recent precedent.&quot; According to Suskind, Obama muses he has &quot;policy wonk&#8217;s disease&quot; and now aims to be more dynamic in telling the American people &quot;who we are and where we’re going.&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : Ron Suskind is our guest. Let&#8217;s continue for a few more minutes with this conversation. Juan?
JUAN GONZALEZ : Well, Ron, I wanted to ask you about the—the thrust of the book is the green nature of Obama, especially when it comes to administration and administering the White House. How did you see his growth throughout that period? What&#8217;s changed from those early days?
RON SUSKIND : You know, I think it&#8217;s—it&#8217;s really what the book&#8217;s about. It&#8217;s about the growth of this man. And we&#8217;re interested in the advisers, as always, as I am with all of the books. And I think other writers would agree, not so much as to who the advisers are and what they do, but as to the glimpse they give of the central actor, the president. That&#8217;s why we always like to hear about White House advisers. And in this case, what you see is the President grappling, often with great might, to try to get his arms around what is often an untenable situation. He has a team around him with long Washington experience and long histories with one another. The President, meanwhile, is ramping up at Mach speed on very difficult, and often very complex, national issues, economic issues, for which there is no recent precedent. Meanwhile, he has—the fact of the matter is, it would take, you know, a manager of the utmost skill to manage Larry Summers, much less Larry Summers and Rahm Emanuel together. The President, who really had been mostly managing his one-man Barack Obama narrative and journey his whole life, without executive experience, certainly—he&#8217;s not a governor. Some governors, of course, they have experience in executing power, which is something fairly unique, actually, in government. And he has, neither, a set of nourishing experiences.
What he finds, going forward, is that he finds the gremlins pop up in a lot of different areas. In some cases, he sort of—he says at one point—I think it&#8217;s sort of telling—he knows he&#8217;s a great, you know, orator. And everyone does. But he&#8217;s frustrated that there&#8217;s not a follow-up to the speeches, that the speeches happen, and there&#8217;s great acclaim, but there&#8217;s not a policy follow-up to the speeches. This is something that frustrates him. Prior to the healthcare speech, after several incidents where he says we didn&#8217;t follow up, he is very, very pointed about &quot;I want&quot; — this is the September 2009 speech on healthcare before the joint session, a crucial speech of his first year — &quot;I want a fully realized healthcare plan, our proposal, out as I give this speech. I&#8217;m going to give the speech, and we&#8217;re going to pass out that proposal.&quot; The President is very focused on this. He, of course, is also writing this speech at high speed. And right coming up until the speech, he is convinced that a full plan, letter and verse of what the administration wants, will be released. In a meeting just prior to the speech, there&#8217;s debate about this. Dan Pfeiffer, Peter Orszag and others think that what&#8217;s now, you know, being proffered, which is a two-page thing of bullet points—the President doesn&#8217;t realize this—is wrong. The President says in this meeting, &quot;We&#8217;re going to release the speech.&quot; Orszag says no—you know, he wants—begins to say, &quot;No, it&#8217;s bullet points.&quot; And he recalls Emanuel gives him the &quot;don&#8217;t say another word&quot; look. Now, I talked to Rahm about this. He says, you know, &quot;I don&#8217;t think that comports with my memory. I would never keep things from the President.&quot; But the fact of the matter is, there are many instances in which those at the uppermost levels of the White House were feeling the President was not fully informed of the flow of events and, in some cases, where policies were going in the White House.
Now, finally, I think now, and importantly, the President has—after this memo was written, he, step by step, tried and did take control of the building. Almost everyone from that first period left, certainly in 2010, from February forward, one after the other, all the way up to Rahm Emanuel in September of the year. Pete Rouse moves in as the interim chief of staff. And starting in November—and the President talks about this with great energy in the interview—the President says, &quot;I have the staff I need.&quot; He felt he did the tax cut deal on the Bush tax cuts, attached the payroll tax cut, which he said was very strong stimulus. He feels emboldened in a way that I think it&#8217;s clear he did not feel before. &quot;I&#8217;ve got this under control. This White House is expressing my will.&quot; The Tucson speech with Gabby Giffords, all the way through. That&#8217;s where the book ends: the President feeling like he&#8217;s got this together.
JUAN GONZALEZ : But isn&#8217;t that, to some degree, those failings, his responsibility vis-à-vis the promise that he gave to all those people who ran for him? Remember, he&#8217;d constantly say, if you bring back the same people to Washington, you&#8217;re going to get the same results. So, he was the change, and yet he brought in all these same people from the Clinton administration to do a lot of his key work.
RON SUSKIND : Yeah, there&#8217;s no doubt that the questions of why he made those choices, what he was thinking, are ones that people ask. They&#8217;ve been asking it from the beginning, pointing out just what you said, Juan. The President, I think if you look at it from his shoes, you know, was facing a very difficult situation where he had to own Washington, tame New York, save a collapsing economy, with a collapsed financial system. He moved, I think, to a team that he felt was tried and true, in terms of dealing with financial crisis. That was his decision.
Going forward, I think he says something interesting in the final interview, where he talks about this experience has been one in which he has learned hard lessons, that he does not want to be legislator-in-chief—that&#8217;s past. He talked about technocratic solutions and his inclination in those directions being not sufficient to the job of president. He says at one point, &quot;Carter, Clinton and I suffer from,&quot; what he called, &quot;the policy wonk&#8217;s disease.&quot; And he feels like, again in February of this year, he&#8217;s shucking that off to be a president who&#8217;s more dynamic, more in control and larger in purpose, and most importantly, being able to tell a story, as he says, to the American people about who we are and where we&#8217;re going, which, he says, is something only a president can do.
AMY GOODMAN : I think why people are so concerned right now—who we are and where we&#8217;re going—cutting Social Security, cutting Medicare, cutting Medicaid, caving to those in the very right of the Republican Party, not even those in the center of the Republican Party, and not responding to the progressive base, right until now. What was—did Obama have to say about that?
RON SUSKIND : Well, you know, I didn&#8217;t get into where you stand politically in the interview. We kept it as to his evolution, what he&#8217;s learned, essentially, as the boss, as the leader. I think that he does say something that&#8217;s—that is telling on that score, when he talks about the Bush tax cuts and the swap he makes after the midterm elections, which is he doesn&#8217;t agree with the Bush tax cuts. He used it to make a swap for the stimulus. But he says that he thinks America felt better, more confident, because Washington was not simply in a gridlock, in stasis, where nothing was being done. And he talks about that as a positive. That is part of, I think, what he would term his evolution. The question is, is that really telegraphing where he will go from here.
AMY GOODMAN : Women meeting with him en masse in the White House to confront President Obama about the senior White House male advisers.
RON SUSKIND : Yes. In the dinner, in the residence, in November of 2009—and this dinner, mind you, has been—this is not the first time it&#8217;s been reported. It was in Jonathan Alter&#8217;s book. It was in Richard Wolff&#8217;s book. They all had a rendering of this scene. I have a rendering with some additional parts, certainly.
I think the thing that is striking about it—two things come to mind. One of Valerie Jarrett walking in—Valerie also, I interviewed for the book—and Anita Dunn were concerned, Valerie especially, that the women would not speak openly to the President. And Anita recalled that Valerie said to her, &quot;I want you to start, Anita,&quot; because Anita is a very forceful character, as I think people now know. &quot;And you start to get the rest moving.&quot; That wasn&#8217;t necessary. The women were free and frank and quite open with the President. And as their comments built, it seemed to coalesce that they were pointed, at least significantly, at Larry Summers and Rahm Emanuel. Both of them are brusque personalities, well known. Some would say they&#8217;re equal opportunity bullies. But the fact is, the women felt their behavior was inappropriate.
At the end of the dinner, the President says, &quot;I hear you. I am sympathetic to what you&#8217;re facing. But I really need these guys,&quot; because the women seemed to suggest that either one or both of them should be fired. The President says, &quot;Yes, yes, I understand, but I really need Rahm and Larry.&quot; Now, some of the women, I think, felt a little deflated from that, that, well, maybe they thought there would be more dramatic action or that maybe the President would take those two senior aides to the woodshed, so to speak. And that, again, is part of the flow of events.
After the meeting, though, things moved forward, and I think expressing their grievances to the President—he&#8217;s the leader of the free world, he&#8217;s very busy; this is something that&#8217;s usually handled by a chief of staff, but Emanuel being at the center of it made that a problem—I think it gave a kind of forward motion. It created a kind of forward motion to this issue, brought it out into the open, and probably created valuable benefits.
AMY GOODMAN : And, of course, Larry Summers was partly forced out of Harvard as president because of his attitude toward women, among the other controversies there, saying women can&#8217;t do science as well as men.
RON SUSKIND : That&#8217;s right.
AMY GOODMAN : Your most—your greatest shock in doing this, what you felt were the most explosive issues, as we sum up. And I know you have to leave for a CNN interview.
RON SUSKIND : Yeah. I think the issue that&#8217;s hardest to reckon with is not just how the President was racing to ramp up, to take control of his building, to do what he needs to do, but the awful combination of circumstances, of the President arriving with so little experience in this way but such demonstrative and demonstrable gifts, if you will, having to get all of this right very quickly, because that&#8217;s the moment of opportunity, in those first few months. And I think that it&#8217;s indisputable now, looking back, and I think the President would agree, that maybe an opportunity then was lost, as many point out, to restructure, as people have talked about in the last two days of this financial sort of up and down, where everybody is pulling their hair out, to restructure the way credit flows in America and the wider global economy, so that we don&#8217;t have this fear and fragility that causes these eruptions, eruptions and ups and downs, that often actually carry ill effects for the wider economy by virtue of people not having confidence to invest, to feel like the landscape will be sound and solid going forward. I think that&#8217;s really the missed opportunity of this period. He may make up for it now. I don&#8217;t think he has any lack of understanding of these things. And so, I think part of the issue, as we look forward—this book brings us up to present—is what now will the President do? Now that I think readers know him better, know why he did what he did, what was happening, they&#8217;ll have a better understanding of what he may do in the future and an understanding of what it means when he does act in the future. And I think that&#8217;s part of the goal of the book.
AMY GOODMAN : Ron Suskind, thanks so much for being with us. Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President , that is the title of the book. nonadulttv-gDemocracy Now!NewsAuthor Ron Suskind on Obama's Evolution amidst Unprecedented Economic and International Challenges In part two of our interview with veteran journalist Ron Suskind about his explosive new book, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President , Suskind discusses the challenges faced by President Obama and his evolution as a leader. &quot;You see the President grappling...to try to get his arms around what is often an untenable situation,&quot; says Suskind. &quot;He has a team around him with long Washington experience and long histories with one another. The President, meanwhile, is ramping up at Mach speed on very difficult, and often very complex, national issues, economic issues, for which there is no recent precedent.&quot; According to Suskind, Obama muses he has &quot;policy wonk&#8217;s disease&quot; and now aims to be more dynamic in telling the American people &quot;who we are and where we’re going.&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : Ron Suskind is our guest. Let&#8217;s continue for a few more minutes with this conversation. Juan?
JUAN GONZALEZ : Well, Ron, I wanted to ask you about the—the thrust of the book is the green nature of Obama, especially when it comes to administration and administering the White House. How did you see his growth throughout that period? What&#8217;s changed from those early days?
RON SUSKIND : You know, I think it&#8217;s—it&#8217;s really what the book&#8217;s about. It&#8217;s about the growth of this man. And we&#8217;re interested in the advisers, as always, as I am with all of the books. And I think other writers would agree, not so much as to who the advisers are and what they do, but as to the glimpse they give of the central actor, the president. That&#8217;s why we always like to hear about White House advisers. And in this case, what you see is the President grappling, often with great might, to try to get his arms around what is often an untenable situation. He has a team around him with long Washington experience and long histories with one another. The President, meanwhile, is ramping up at Mach speed on very difficult, and often very complex, national issues, economic issues, for which there is no recent precedent. Meanwhile, he has—the fact of the matter is, it would take, you know, a manager of the utmost skill to manage Larry Summers, much less Larry Summers and Rahm Emanuel together. The President, who really had been mostly managing his one-man Barack Obama narrative and journey his whole life, without executive experience, certainly—he&#8217;s not a governor. Some governors, of course, they have experience in executing power, which is something fairly unique, actually, in government. And he has, neither, a set of nourishing experiences.
What he finds, going forward, is that he finds the gremlins pop up in a lot of different areas. In some cases, he sort of—he says at one point—I think it&#8217;s sort of telling—he knows he&#8217;s a great, you know, orator. And everyone does. But he&#8217;s frustrated that there&#8217;s not a follow-up to the speeches, that the speeches happen, and there&#8217;s great acclaim, but there&#8217;s not a policy follow-up to the speeches. This is something that frustrates him. Prior to the healthcare speech, after several incidents where he says we didn&#8217;t follow up, he is very, very pointed about &quot;I want&quot; — this is the September 2009 speech on healthcare before the joint session, a crucial speech of his first year — &quot;I want a fully realized healthcare plan, our proposal, out as I give this speech. I&#8217;m going to give the speech, and we&#8217;re going to pass out that proposal.&quot; The President is very focused on this. He, of course, is also writing this speech at high speed. And right coming up until the speech, he is convinced that a full plan, letter and verse of what the administration wants, will be released. In a meeting just prior to the speech, there&#8217;s debate about this. Dan Pfeiffer, Peter Orszag and others think that what&#8217;s now, you know, being proffered, which is a two-page thing of bullet points—the President doesn&#8217;t realize this—is wrong. The President says in this meeting, &quot;We&#8217;re going to release the speech.&quot; Orszag says no—you know, he wants—begins to say, &quot;No, it&#8217;s bullet points.&quot; And he recalls Emanuel gives him the &quot;don&#8217;t say another word&quot; look. Now, I talked to Rahm about this. He says, you know, &quot;I don&#8217;t think that comports with my memory. I would never keep things from the President.&quot; But the fact of the matter is, there are many instances in which those at the uppermost levels of the White House were feeling the President was not fully informed of the flow of events and, in some cases, where policies were going in the White House.
Now, finally, I think now, and importantly, the President has—after this memo was written, he, step by step, tried and did take control of the building. Almost everyone from that first period left, certainly in 2010, from February forward, one after the other, all the way up to Rahm Emanuel in September of the year. Pete Rouse moves in as the interim chief of staff. And starting in November—and the President talks about this with great energy in the interview—the President says, &quot;I have the staff I need.&quot; He felt he did the tax cut deal on the Bush tax cuts, attached the payroll tax cut, which he said was very strong stimulus. He feels emboldened in a way that I think it&#8217;s clear he did not feel before. &quot;I&#8217;ve got this under control. This White House is expressing my will.&quot; The Tucson speech with Gabby Giffords, all the way through. That&#8217;s where the book ends: the President feeling like he&#8217;s got this together.
JUAN GONZALEZ : But isn&#8217;t that, to some degree, those failings, his responsibility vis-à-vis the promise that he gave to all those people who ran for him? Remember, he&#8217;d constantly say, if you bring back the same people to Washington, you&#8217;re going to get the same results. So, he was the change, and yet he brought in all these same people from the Clinton administration to do a lot of his key work.
RON SUSKIND : Yeah, there&#8217;s no doubt that the questions of why he made those choices, what he was thinking, are ones that people ask. They&#8217;ve been asking it from the beginning, pointing out just what you said, Juan. The President, I think if you look at it from his shoes, you know, was facing a very difficult situation where he had to own Washington, tame New York, save a collapsing economy, with a collapsed financial system. He moved, I think, to a team that he felt was tried and true, in terms of dealing with financial crisis. That was his decision.
Going forward, I think he says something interesting in the final interview, where he talks about this experience has been one in which he has learned hard lessons, that he does not want to be legislator-in-chief—that&#8217;s past. He talked about technocratic solutions and his inclination in those directions being not sufficient to the job of president. He says at one point, &quot;Carter, Clinton and I suffer from,&quot; what he called, &quot;the policy wonk&#8217;s disease.&quot; And he feels like, again in February of this year, he&#8217;s shucking that off to be a president who&#8217;s more dynamic, more in control and larger in purpose, and most importantly, being able to tell a story, as he says, to the American people about who we are and where we&#8217;re going, which, he says, is something only a president can do.
AMY GOODMAN : I think why people are so concerned right now—who we are and where we&#8217;re going—cutting Social Security, cutting Medicare, cutting Medicaid, caving to those in the very right of the Republican Party, not even those in the center of the Republican Party, and not responding to the progressive base, right until now. What was—did Obama have to say about that?
RON SUSKIND : Well, you know, I didn&#8217;t get into where you stand politically in the interview. We kept it as to his evolution, what he&#8217;s learned, essentially, as the boss, as the leader. I think that he does say something that&#8217;s—that is telling on that score, when he talks about the Bush tax cuts and the swap he makes after the midterm elections, which is he doesn&#8217;t agree with the Bush tax cuts. He used it to make a swap for the stimulus. But he says that he thinks America felt better, more confident, because Washington was not simply in a gridlock, in stasis, where nothing was being done. And he talks about that as a positive. That is part of, I think, what he would term his evolution. The question is, is that really telegraphing where he will go from here.
AMY GOODMAN : Women meeting with him en masse in the White House to confront President Obama about the senior White House male advisers.
RON SUSKIND : Yes. In the dinner, in the residence, in November of 2009—and this dinner, mind you, has been—this is not the first time it&#8217;s been reported. It was in Jonathan Alter&#8217;s book. It was in Richard Wolff&#8217;s book. They all had a rendering of this scene. I have a rendering with some additional parts, certainly.
I think the thing that is striking about it—two things come to mind. One of Valerie Jarrett walking in—Valerie also, I interviewed for the book—and Anita Dunn were concerned, Valerie especially, that the women would not speak openly to the President. And Anita recalled that Valerie said to her, &quot;I want you to start, Anita,&quot; because Anita is a very forceful character, as I think people now know. &quot;And you start to get the rest moving.&quot; That wasn&#8217;t necessary. The women were free and frank and quite open with the President. And as their comments built, it seemed to coalesce that they were pointed, at least significantly, at Larry Summers and Rahm Emanuel. Both of them are brusque personalities, well known. Some would say they&#8217;re equal opportunity bullies. But the fact is, the women felt their behavior was inappropriate.
At the end of the dinner, the President says, &quot;I hear you. I am sympathetic to what you&#8217;re facing. But I really need these guys,&quot; because the women seemed to suggest that either one or both of them should be fired. The President says, &quot;Yes, yes, I understand, but I really need Rahm and Larry.&quot; Now, some of the women, I think, felt a little deflated from that, that, well, maybe they thought there would be more dramatic action or that maybe the President would take those two senior aides to the woodshed, so to speak. And that, again, is part of the flow of events.
After the meeting, though, things moved forward, and I think expressing their grievances to the President—he&#8217;s the leader of the free world, he&#8217;s very busy; this is something that&#8217;s usually handled by a chief of staff, but Emanuel being at the center of it made that a problem—I think it gave a kind of forward motion. It created a kind of forward motion to this issue, brought it out into the open, and probably created valuable benefits.
AMY GOODMAN : And, of course, Larry Summers was partly forced out of Harvard as president because of his attitude toward women, among the other controversies there, saying women can&#8217;t do science as well as men.
RON SUSKIND : That&#8217;s right.
AMY GOODMAN : Your most—your greatest shock in doing this, what you felt were the most explosive issues, as we sum up. And I know you have to leave for a CNN interview.
RON SUSKIND : Yeah. I think the issue that&#8217;s hardest to reckon with is not just how the President was racing to ramp up, to take control of his building, to do what he needs to do, but the awful combination of circumstances, of the President arriving with so little experience in this way but such demonstrative and demonstrable gifts, if you will, having to get all of this right very quickly, because that&#8217;s the moment of opportunity, in those first few months. And I think that it&#8217;s indisputable now, looking back, and I think the President would agree, that maybe an opportunity then was lost, as many point out, to restructure, as people have talked about in the last two days of this financial sort of up and down, where everybody is pulling their hair out, to restructure the way credit flows in America and the wider global economy, so that we don&#8217;t have this fear and fragility that causes these eruptions, eruptions and ups and downs, that often actually carry ill effects for the wider economy by virtue of people not having confidence to invest, to feel like the landscape will be sound and solid going forward. I think that&#8217;s really the missed opportunity of this period. He may make up for it now. I don&#8217;t think he has any lack of understanding of these things. And so, I think part of the issue, as we look forward—this book brings us up to present—is what now will the President do? Now that I think readers know him better, know why he did what he did, what was happening, they&#8217;ll have a better understanding of what he may do in the future and an understanding of what it means when he does act in the future. And I think that&#8217;s part of the goal of the book.
AMY GOODMAN : Ron Suskind, thanks so much for being with us. Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President , that is the title of the book. nonadulttv-gDemocracy Now!News